A variety of recent work in epistemology employs a notion of normality to provide novel theories of knowledge or justification. While such theories are commonly advertised as affording particularly strong epistemic logics, they often make substantive assumptions about the background notion of normality and its logic. This article takes recent normality-based defences of the KK principle as a case study to submit such assumptions to scrutiny. After clarifying issues regarding the natural language use of normality claims, the article isolates a number of choice points regarding the role of contingency, context-sensitivity and similarity in our theorizing with normality. It turns out that both weaker and stronger logics of normality can be motivated depending on how such choices are resolved. And yet securing logics of normality strong enough for normality to play its envisaged role in epistemology may have unwelcome downstream consequences for the resultant theories of knowledge or justification.
A growing consensus in the literature on agentive modals has it that ability modals like ‘can’ or ‘able to’ have a dual, i.e. interpretations of ‘must’ or ‘cannot but’ which stand to necessity as ability stands to possibility. We argue that this thesis (which we call ‘Agentive Duality’) is much more controversial than meets the eye. While Agentive Duality follows from the orthodox possibility analysis of ability given natural assumptions, it sits uneasily with a wide range of alternative proposals which are unified by the idea that ability requires control. In particular, we show that against the background of a control requirement on ability, Agentive Duality can be used to derive absurd predictions featuring this dual. Far from being a purely definitional thesis, Agentive Duality thus affords a new lens through which to assess the long-standing debate between possibility analyses of ability and their discontents.
It is both a matter of everyday experience and a tenet of sociological theory that people often occupy a range of social roles and identities, some of which are associated with mutually incompatible properties. But since nothing could have incompatible properties, it is not clear how this is possible. It has been suggested, notably by Kit Fine (1982, 1999, 2006), that the puzzling relation between a person and their various social roles and identities can be explained by admitting an ontology of social qua objects—objects constituted by, yet distinct from, the persons on which they are based. This article argues that admitting even a rich ontology of such qua objects does not suffice to explain the puzzle cases of interest. Instead, alternative resources are required which, once available, diminish the motivation for adopting an ontology of social qua objects in the first place. The paper concludes by considering whether there remains work for social qua objects in explaining differences in persistence conditions between a person and the social individuals to which they may give rise, but reaches a negative verdict. Social qua objects, if they exist, have little work to do in our theorizing about the relation between a person and their various social roles and identities.
Barbara Vetter proposes that certain epistemic and metasemantic challenges to our theorizing about metaphysical modality can be met by an approach which generalizes from every day paradigms of objective modality – notably the abilities and dispositions familiar to us “from the context of action” – to give content to the more abstract notion of a most general objective modality: metaphysical modality. I argue that the ability ascriptions which are central to our day to day practical reasoning are permeated with opacity and therefore make for problematic paradigms of an objective modality. While Vetter could retrospectively “purify” her sample of paradigms, this would leave her in a similar position as those who seek to restrict a particularly broad modality, e.g. a priori conceivability, to its objective core. I conclude by taking on Vetter’s pessimistic conjecture that proponents of different approaches to the metasemantic challenge operate under assumptions so dramatically different that we should not expect them to even share a subject matter. Against this, I give an argument which suggests that so long as there is agreement regarding the theoretical role of metaphysical modality, it would be surprising if it made a difference whether one approached metaphysical modality by generalizing from one well-understood modality rather than by restricting another. Keywords: objective modality, abilities, opacity, broadest necessity
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.