Varieties of Modality I
I gave my first talk on the Varieties of Modality at the Problèmes de métaphysique seminar in Geneva last Thursday. It went fine and we had some good discussions, but it was really only an introductory talk, I’m hoping to get into more detail in my next talk. The seminar has a bit of a mixed audience — I understand that it is compulsory for the MA students, but many PhD students and some staff come as well. Generally the talks seem to be pitched much too high for MA students, so I tried to make mine a bit more accessible. Anyway, the discussion is (unfortunately) generally just between the speaker and a number of PhD students and staff.
In my first talk I covered what I call the Kripkean account of different types of modality, which views metaphysical possibility as a proper subset of conceptual/epistemic possibility. It’s not quite clear what Kripke thought about logical possibility, but at times it seems as if it’s co-extensive with metaphysical possibility. I also talked about what I call the conservative account, which is somewhat hostile towards the Kripkean account of metaphysical modality. I looked into Bob Hale’s 1996 paper Absolute Necessities, which I mentioned in a previous post as well. Hale argues that logical necessity is absolute and metaphysical necessity is relative, or at best they are equally strong. In the end I think that the conservative account is not in much tension with the Kripkean account though, because contrary to what Bob Hale claims, a friend of metaphysical modality can easily acknowledge that metaphysical necessity is relative. My slides from the first talk are available here.
Next week I will cover what I call the conceptualist approach and the essentialist approach.
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