Grounding Modality
I gave a talk with the above title at the ECAP 7 conference in Milan two weeks ago. Several people were interested in the paper, and as I’ve now had the chance to make some minor revisions to it, I thought I’d post the draft here. I’m not entirely happy with the paper yet, but at this point it might be useful to get some feedback, so I turn to you, my dear readers.
The paper discusses the relationship between essence and modality in a Finean context. Like Kit Fine has argued, I take it that metaphysical modality reduces, or is grounded in, essence. I do not defend or comment on Fine’s arguments to this effect though, rather, I develop on this idea and attempt to clarify how modality can be understood in terms of essence. In the Finean account, a crucial part of this understanding is the grounding relation, which is manifested via the ‘is true in virtue of the nature of…’ predicate, e.g. metaphysically necessary propositions are true in virtue of the natures of all things (as opposed to some proper subset of all things). It is this predicate that I am interested in.
Although the account that I will suggest is sympathetic to the Finean picture, I consider there to be one serious caveat in the Finean account: there is no reliable method which would enable us to distinguish between what could be called genuine metaphysical possibilities and metaphysical impossibilities, or, as I call the latter, pseudo-possibilities — that is, metaphysically impossible yet conceptually or logically possible worlds, such as worlds in which gold is not an element, cats are not animals, water is XYZ instead of H2O, and so on. I propose that we have to introduce a stricter understanding of the relationship between essence and modality to rule out pseudo-possibilities altogether. My account has one significant cost though: it requires abadoning the duality of possibility and necessity, i.e. it is not the case that p is possible iff not-p is not necessary, and it is not the case that p is necessary iff not-p is not possible. I also suggest that we should define different kinds of possibility and necessity not in terms of the Finean ‘is true in virtue of the nature of…’ predicate, but in terms of two different predicates — one for possibility and one for necessity — that latch on to what makes a certain proposition possible or necessary, rather than what makes it true:
MET: p is metaphysically necessary (possible) iff p is necessary (possible) in virtue of the nature(s) of the (concrete, non-conceptual) entities relevant to p.
CON: p is conceptually necessary (possible) iff p is necessary (possible) in virtue of the nature(s) of the (abstract) concepts relevant to p.
LOG: p is logically necessary (possible) iff p is necessary (possible) in virtue of the nature(s) of the (abstract, non-conceptual) logical entities relevant to p.
Defining necessity and possibility in terms of what is ‘relevant’ for the proposition in question requires further explanation. The idea is that p is metaphysically necessary only in virtue of the particular nature or natures of the entities that are actively involved in making p necessary. What I mean by active involvement is that particular features of the essence of a given object give raise to the modal constraints that it manifests; this serves to distinguish genuine modalities from the supposed modal truths that emerge only passively, namely via the lack of modal constraints. Modal truths that emerge passively are, due to the manner of their introduction, (pseudo-)possibilities: for instance, if a given scenario is not contradictory, i.e. it is not ruled out by conceptual or logical analysis, then it is generally judged to be possible.
In the full paper I go on to analyze different kinds of modality and demonstrate how they can be accommodated in the proposed account in such a way that pseudo-possibilities can be ruled out.
Comments are most welcome! I know it’s a bit of a crazy view, but I’m keen to see how far I can take it.
