Abstract
This chapter begins Part II. In it, I develop a general framework for selecting between competing modal epistemologies, focusing on three desiderata that are especially relevant to our choice: conservatism, simplicity, and the ability to handle modal disagreement. Unsurprisingly, I argue that TEM fares well in the relevant respects. However, I’ll also distinguish the senses in which TEM is and isn’t conservative, eventually describing TEM’s disagreement with some modal intuitions as its cautiousness. This requires further discussion in subsequent chapters.
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Notes
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The adequacy requirement in the first premise ensures that h isn’t merely the best of a bad lot. Granted, it matters a great deal how we articulate the relevant standard of adequacy, though I won’t explore that issue here. For more on the “best of a bad lot” objection, see van Fraassen (1989) and Lipton (2004).
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For more on this line of argument, see Fischer (2014).
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See Tuomela (2000) for further discussion of the differences between belief and acceptance.
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We might think about getting new cases right as a kind of predictive accuracy. That is, for some modal claim not heretofore considered, the theory implies that we wouldn’t be justified in believing it, and when we consider it, we concur that we aren’t justified in believing it. But I don’t see what’s gained by thinking of this as predictive accuracy rather than another dimension of conservatism, so I’ll stick with the latter.
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An example on the justified side: my coffee could be warmer than it is; an example on the unjustified side: the liquid I used to make my coffee (i.e., water) could be XYZ.
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Likewise, I submit that a modal epistemology is preferable insofar as it maintains that the methods by which we acquire justified modal beliefs are the methods by which we tend to acquire modal beliefs. So whatever we believe about the methods by which we acquire justification about modal matters, a theory is better insofar as it spares us from revising these beliefs.
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“Imagining can be either propositional—imagining that there is a tiger behind the curtain—or objectual—imagining the tiger itself. To be sure, in imagining the tiger, I imagine it as endowed with certain properties, such as sitting behind the curtain or preparing to leap; and I may also imagine that it has those properties. So objectual imagining has in some cases a propositional accompaniment. Still the two kinds of imagining are distinct, for only the second has alethic content-the kind that can be evaluated as true or false—and only the first has referential content—the kind that purports to depict an object” (1993, 27).
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There are, of course, various ways in which one hypothesis can be simpler than another: it postulates fewer objects; it postulates fewer kinds; it is syntactically simpler; it employs fewer argument patterns to achieve the same explanatory ends (as in Kitcher’s brand of unification); etc. Some ways are more important than others, but this isn’t the place to explore which and why. For further discussion, see Nolan (1997).
- 15.
For a formal argument for the same conclusion, see Kelly (2007).
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Of course, we might also doubt that the correlation obtains; on this point, see Vaidya (2008).
- 17.
On the other hand, God makes available a kind of Augustinian platonism, which means that you don’t have to postulate independent abstract objects, and O’Connor uses God’s power as what grounds modal facts. Simplicity might favor O’Connor’s view if you can explain all this by postulating a single being.
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See, e.g., Roca-Royes (2007), Leon (2009), and Biggs (2010). On a different note, someone might worry that we need to be able to assess the modal consequences of competing theories in order to assess their relative conservatism or simplicity, which requires having modal justification to get modal justification. So is it circular to rely on the virtues? No. Recall Sect. 3.3: conditional modal knowledge is cheap, and that’s the only information that’s required at the comparison stage.
- 19.
There may well be a way to construe this virtue in terms of conservatism or simplicity, but in the present context, little would be gained from trying.
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Someone might object that this isn’t an assumption—it’s a conclusion, and one that’s warranted based on the seeing. I find this implausible. First, if it’s a conclusion, then it appears to be one that’s reached without considering alternatives; and, if that’s right, then one wonders why we should take it to be warranted. Second, note that we have a fairly clear account of how we can “perceive” sophisticated facts thanks to relevant prior knowledge: the neurologist “sees” frontal cortical atrophy on a CT scan, whereas I see a Rorschach test, because of what the neurologist knows about brains, CT scans, and the like. And absent such knowledge, the perception would be completely mysterious. So, barring considerations to the contrary, we should offer a model of our perception of modal facts that’s in line with our model of the perception of actuality. (Of course, in the modal case, the assumption is no doubt implicit, but that makes no difference: what matters is that background information constrains the interpretation of the data.)
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This is, essentially, the criticism leveled in Jackson et al. (1982).
- 24.
That said, I don’t mean to imply that the case for acceptance is watertight. Our judgment to accept, rather than believe, is based on our threshold for epistemic risk. Our threshold of epistemic risk is the point at which we are unwilling to venture belief based on the evidence; it’s the point at which we judge that the risk of believing falsely outweighs the possibility of believing truth. If we put thresholds on a simple spectrum, then it would be one that runs from skeptic to sucker. Skeptics have a very low threshold for epistemic risk, and hence they deny that we know much of anything. Suckers, by contrast, have a high threshold; they are eternal optimists when it comes to the scope of their knowledge. Let’s grant that we shouldn’t set our threshold at either extreme. Might there be a range of acceptable thresholds in the middle? Perhaps so. And in the present case, I see no obvious reason to deny that, with the right argument behind it, tentative belief could be an appropriate attitude. For more on ranges of epistemic risk, see Riggs (2008).
- 25.
It’s interesting to consider whether identities are an exception to this generalization. However, you might well deny that identity claims are non-modal—at least if by “identity” we mean identity, and not just a relation that’s actually symmetric, transitive, and reflexive.
- 26.
I take it that, for every (purportedly) non-modal facts, some modal fact or other supervenes on it. When a supervenience relation is universal in this way, one begins to wonder about the plausibility of the claim that the supervenience base and the supervening facts are truly distinct. And insofar as a claim’s being non-modal depends on its subject matter being non-modal, the supervenience of the modal on the non-modal provides reason to deny that there are truly non-modal claims.
- 27.
I don’t know whether Cartesian skepticism is the exception to my claim that there is a natural correlation between (alleged) knowledge of actuality and (alleged) knowledge of possibility and necessity. The skeptic denies that we justifiably believe anything of which we are not certain. Presumably, this rules out ordinary and scientific theories but rules in some logic, and therefore the skeptic is likely to regard consistency as a guide to possibility. At first blush, then, we should say that the skeptic is entitled to the modal premises that she employs in her skeptical arguments, since—for example—it does seem that the evil demon scenario is consistent. If this is right, then skepticism is the exception to my rule. However, I wonder whether the skeptic should be certain that the evil demon scenario is consistent. What would it take to show this? I am not sure, and I doubt that she is either. This doesn’t create a problem for skepticism—since it may suffice for her purposes if the evil demon scenario is merely epistemically possible—but it is enough to keep my correlation principle intact.
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Fischer, B. (2017). Theory Selection. In: Modal Justification via Theories. Synthese Library, vol 380. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-49127-1_4
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