About this topic
Summary There are several things that we do not know about the world. Currently, for instance, I do not know whether it is raining in Canberra or not. So it is possible for me, epistemically speaking, that it rains in Canberra, and it is possible for me, epistemically speaking, that it does not. Most agree that epistemic possibilities are somehow related to knowledge: roughly, a possibility is an epistemic possibility just in case it is not known that it does not obtain. There are three central questions that philosophers ask about epistemic possibilities. First, what are epistemic possibilities? Some argue that they are akin to metaphysically possible worlds, others that they are akin to a priori consistent ways the world might be, and others again that at least some epistemic possibilities are akin to impossible worlds. Second, whose knowledge matters for determining what is epistemically possible and not? Some hold that it is the knowledge of a single subject that matters, while others hold that it is the knowledge of a group that matters. Third, what is the semantic analysis of epistemic modals? In natural language, epistemic possibilities are often expressed by sentences such as "It might be that P" and "For all I know, P", and people have proposed contextualist, relativist, contrastive, and non-truth-conditional analysis of such epistemic modals. 
Key works For issues concerning the nature of epistemic possibilities, see in particular Chalmers 2011 and Soames 2011. For issues concerning the knowledge-based analysis of epistemic possibility, see in particular DeRose 1991. For issues concerning the semantics of epistemic modals, see the entry on "Epistemic Modals" for details. 
Introductions Egan & Weatherson 2011 contains a collection of recent essays on epistemic possibility. Egan and Weatherson's introduction to the collection is very useful for gaining an overview of the main issues discussed in the literature. 
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135 found
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  1. Abstracta and Possibilia: Hyperintensional Foundations of Mathematical Platonism.Timothy Bowen - manuscript
    This paper aims to provide hyperintensional foundations for mathematical platonism. I examine Hale and Wright's (2009) objections to the merits and need, in the defense of mathematical platonism and its epistemology, of the thesis of Necessitism. In response to Hale and Wright's objections to the role of epistemic and metaphysical modalities in providing justification for both the truth of abstraction principles and the success of mathematical predicate reference, I examine the Necessitist commitments of the abundant conception of properties endorsed by (...)
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  2. Modal Cognitivism and Modal Expressivism.Timothy Bowen - manuscript
    This paper aims to provide a mathematically tractable background against which to model both modal cognitivism and modal expressivism. I argue that epistemic modal algebras, endowed with a hyperintensional, topic-sensitive epistemic two-dimensional truthmaker semantics, comprise a materially adequate fragment of the language of thought. I demonstrate, then, how modal expressivism can be regimented by modal coalgebraic automata, to which the above epistemic modal algebras are categorically dual. I examine five methods for modeling the dynamics of conceptual engineering for intensions and (...)
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  3. Modality and Hyperintensionality in Mathematics.Timothy Bowen - manuscript
    This paper aims to contribute to the analysis of the nature of mathematical modality and hyperintensionality, and to the applications of the latter to absolute decidability. Rather than countenancing the interpretational type of mathematical modality as a primitive, I argue that the interpretational type of mathematical modality is a species of epistemic modality. I argue, then, that the framework of two-dimensional semantics ought to be applied to the mathematical setting. The framework permits of a formally precise account of the priority (...)
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  4. Conceivability, Essence, and Haecceities.Timothy Bowen - manuscript
    This essay aims to redress the contention that epistemic possibility cannot be a guide to the principles of modal metaphysics. I introduce a novel epistemic two-dimensional truthmaker semantics. I argue that the interaction between the two-dimensional framework and the mereological parthood relation, which is super-rigid, enables epistemic possibilities and truthmakers with regard to parthood to be a guide to its metaphysical profile. I specify, further, a two-dimensional formula encoding the relation between the epistemic possibility and verification of essential properties obtaining (...)
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  5. Intention: Hyperintensional Semantics and Decision Theory.Timothy Bowen - manuscript
    This paper argues that the types of intention can be modeled both as modal operators and via a multi-hyperintensional semantics. I delineate the semantic profiles of the types of intention, and provide a precise account of how the types of intention are unified in virtue of both their operations in a single, encompassing, epistemic space, and their role in practical reasoning. I endeavor to provide reasons adducing against the proposal that the types of intention are reducible to the mental states (...)
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  6. Two-Context Probabilism and the Dissolution of the 'Lottery' Problem.Gregor Flock - manuscript
    In this paper it will be attempted to dissolve the lottery problem based on fallibilism, probabilism and the introduction of a so far widely neglected second context of knowledge. First, it will be argued that the lottery problem is actually an exemplification of the much wider Humean "future knowledge problem" (ch. 1). Two types of inferences and arguments will be examined, compared and evaluated in respect to their ability to fittingly describe the thought processes behind lottery/future knowledge propositions (ch. 2). (...)
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  7. Logical and Epistemic Modality.Hasen Khudairi - manuscript
    This paper examines the interaction between the philosophy and psychology of concepts and the modal characterization of the deductive concept of logical validity. The concept of logical consequence on which I focus is model-theoretic, where the concept records the property of necessary truth-preservation from the premise of an argument to its conclusion, as well as the condition that, in the class of all possible worlds in which a premise is true, a consequent formula or succedent class of formulas is true, (...)
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  8. Cognitivism about Epistemic Modality.Hasen Khudairi - manuscript
    This paper aims to vindicate the thesis that cognitive computational properties are abstract objects implemented in physical systems. I avail of the equivalence relations countenanced in Homotopy Type Theory, in order to specify an abstraction principle for epistemic intensions. The homotopic abstraction principle for epistemic intensions provides an epistemic conduit into our knowledge of intensions as abstract objects. I examine, then, how intensional functions in Epistemic Modal Algebra are deployed as core models in the philosophy of mind, Bayesian perceptual psychology, (...)
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  9. Conceivability and Haecceitism.Hasen Khudairi - manuscript
    This essay aims to redress the contention that epistemic possibility cannot be a guide to the principles of modal metaphysics. I argue that the interaction between the multi-dimensional intensional framework and intensional plural quantification enables epistemic possibilities to target the haecceitistic properties of individuals. I outline the elements of plural logic, and I specify, then, a multi-dimensional intensional formula encoding the relation between the epistemic possibility of haecceity comprehension and its metaphysical possibility. I conclude by addressing objections from the indeterminacy (...)
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  10. Epistemic Modalities and Relative Truth.John MacFarlane - manuscript
    I want to discuss a puzzle about the semantics of epistemic modals, like “It might be the case that” as it occurs in “It might be the case that Goldbach’s conjecture is false.”1 I’ll argue that the puzzle cannot be adequately explained on standard accounts of the semantics of epistemic modals, and that a proper solution requires relativizing utterance truth to a context of assessment, a semantic device whose utility and coherence I have defended elsewhere for future contingents (MacFarlane..
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  11. Three Strategies for Salvaging Epistemic Value in Deep Neural Network Modeling.Philippe Verreault-Julien - manuscript
    Some how-possibly explanations have epistemic value because they are epistemically possible; we cannot rule out their truth. One paradoxical implication of that proposal is that epistemic value may be obtained from mere ignorance. For the less we know, then the more is epistemically possible. This chapter examines a particular class of problematic epistemically possible how-possibly explanations, viz. *epistemically opaque* how-possibly explanations. Those are how-possibly explanations justified by an epistemically opaque process. How could epistemically opaque how-possibly explanations have epistemic value if (...)
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  12. Legal Evidence and Knowledge.Georgi Gardiner - forthcoming - In Clayton Littlejohn & Maria Lasonen Aarnio (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Evidence.
    This essay is an accessible introduction to the proof paradox in legal epistemology. -/- In 1902 the Supreme Judicial Court of Maine filed an influential legal verdict. The judge claimed that in order to find a defendant culpable, the plaintiff “must adduce evidence other than a majority of chances”. The judge thereby claimed that bare statistical evidence does not suffice for legal proof. -/- In this essay I first motivate the claim that bare statistical evidence does not suffice for legal (...)
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  13. Epistemic Cans.Tim Kearl & Christopher Willard-Kyle - forthcoming - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research.
    We argue that S is in a position to know that p iff S can know that p. Thus, what makes position-to-know-ascriptions true is just a special case of what makes ability-ascriptions true: compossibility. The novelty of our compossibility theory of epistemic modality lies in its subsuming epistemic modality under agentive modality, the modality characterizing what agents can do.
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  14. Understanding with epistemic possibilities: The epistemic aim and value of metaphysics.Ylwa Sjölin Wirling - forthcoming - Argumenta.
    According to a recent proposal, the epistemic aim of metaphysics as a discipline is to chart the different viable theories of metaphysical objects of inquiry (e.g. causation, persistence). This paper elaborates on and seeks to improve on that proposal in two related ways. First, drawing on an analogy with how-possibly explanation in science, I argue that we can usefully understand this aim of metaphysics as the charting of epistemically possible answers to metaphysical questions. Second, I argue that in order to (...)
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  15. Dynamic "Might" and Correct Belief.Patrick Skeels - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
    Veltman’s test semantics and developments thereof reject the canon about semantic contents and attitude ascriptions in favor of dynamic alternatives. According to these theories the semantic content of a sentence is not a proposition, but a context change potential (CCP). Similarly, beliefs are not taken to be relations between agents and propositions, but agents and CCPs. These deviations from the canon come at the cost of an elegant explanation about the correctness of belief. Standardly, it is taken that the content (...)
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  16. Rational belief, epistemic possibility, and the a priori.Claire Https://Orcidorg Field - 2024 - Asian Journal of Philosophy 3 (1):1-9.
    In this paper, I discuss Whiting’s (2021) account of rational belief and discuss some unresolved issues arising from its reliance on epistemic possibility and, by extension, perspective-relative aprioricity.
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  17. Epistemic Possibility, Concessive Knowledge Attributions, and Fallibilism.Wayne A. Davis - 2023 - Journal of Philosophy 120 (12):656-680.
    I argue that modal terms have an epistemic interpretation on which concessive knowledge attributions are semantically contradictory. This is compatible with the fallibilist view that the basis on which we know something need not entail it, but not with the view that what is known need not be epistemically certain or necessary. The apparent contradictoriness of concessive knowledge attributions is not due to mere implicature, nor to assertion updating the modal base. And it is contextually invariant. Concessive knowledge attributions contrast (...)
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  18. Is Death Irreversible?Nada Gligorov - 2023 - Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 48 (5):492-503.
    There are currently two legally established criteria for death: the irreversible cessation of circulation and respiration and the irreversible cessation of neurologic function. Recently, there have been technological developments that could undermine the irreversibility requirement. In this paper, I focus both on whether death should be identified as an irreversible state and on the proper scope of irreversibility in the biological definition of death. In this paper, I tackle the distinction between the commonsense definition of death and the biological definition (...)
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  19. Who Is Afraid of Truth Gaps? Wittgenstein and Kripke on the Standard Meter.Jakub Mácha - 2023 - In Martin Gustafsson, Oskari Kuusela & Jakub Mácha (eds.), Engaging Kripke with Wittgenstein: The Standard Meter, Contingent Apriori, and Beyond. New York: Routledge. pp. 127-140.
    I argue that Kripke’s apparent disagreement with Wittgenstein’s claims about the Standard Meter is based on two different ways of fixing reference. Kripke proposes that “meter” rigidly refers to the length that the Standard Meter has at time t0. This length is an abstract object postulated by the theory of absolute space. Wittgenstein, in contrast, seems to presuppose that “meter” rigidly refers to the Standard Meter. Both ways of fixing reference have their advantages and disadvantages. Yet Wittgenstein’s way of fixing (...)
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  20. Correction to: A hyperintensional approach to positive epistemic possibility.Niccolò Rossi & Aybüke Özgün - 2023 - Synthese 202 (3):1-1.
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  21. A hyperintensional approach to positive epistemic possibility.Niccolò Rossi & Aybüke Özgün - 2023 - Synthese 202 (44):1-29.
    The received view says that possibility is the dual of necessity: a proposition is (metaphysically, logically, epistemically etc.) possible iff it is not the case that its negation is (metaphysically, logically, epistemically etc., respectively) necessary. This reading is usually taken for granted by modal logicians and indeed seems plausible when dealing with logical or metaphysical possibility. But what about epistemic possibility? We argue that the dual definition of epistemic possibility in terms of epistemic necessity generates tension when reasoning about non-idealized (...)
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  22. Does Chance Undermine Would?Alexander W. Kocurek - 2022 - Mind 131 (523):747-785.
    Counterfactual scepticism holds that most ordinary counterfactuals are false. The main argument for this view appeals to a ‘chance undermines would’ principle: if ψ would have some chance of not obtaining had ϕ obtained, then ϕ □→ ψ is false. This principle seems to follow from two fairly weak principles, namely, that ‘chance ensures could’ and that ϕ □→ ψ and ϕ ⋄→ ¬ ψ clash. Despite their initial plausibility, I show that these principles are independently problematic: given some modest (...)
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  23. Epistemic Injustice in the Education of People with Mental Disabilities.José Álvarez Sanchez & Ana María Rosas Rodríguez - 2022 - Educação and Realidade 1 (47).
    ABSTRACT – Epistemic Injustice in the Education of People with Mental Disabilities. This article offers a perspective on inclusive education based on Fricker’s conception of epistemic injustice. What is the relationship be- tween inclusive education and epistemic injustice in the case of students with mental deficiencies? By adapting Fricker’s thesis to this extreme case, epistemic injustice can be explored via the social model of disability (SMD). Accordingly, we propose that epistemic injustice harms the entire educa- tional community and society. -/- (...)
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  24. Injusticias Epistémicas en la Educación de Personas con Discapacidad Mental.José Álvarez Sanchez & Ana María Rosas Rodriguez - 2022 - Educação and Realidade 1 (47).
    RESUMEN ‒ Injusticias Epistémicas en la Educación de Personas con Dis- capacidad Mental. Se ofrece en este artículo una perspectiva de la educa- ción inclusiva a partir de la concepción de las injusticias epistémicas de Fricker. Se pregunta cuál es la relación entre la educación inclusiva y la in- justicia epistémica en el caso de estudiantes con deficiencias mentales. Es necesario adaptar las tesis de Fricker a este caso límite, por lo que se debe pensar la injusticias epistémicas a partir (...)
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  25. Mighty Knowledge.Bob Beddor & Simon Goldstein - 2021 - Journal of Philosophy 118 (5):229-269.
    We often claim to know what might be—or probably is—the case. Modal knowledge along these lines creates a puzzle for information-sensitive semantics for epistemic modals. This paper develops a solution. We start with the idea that knowledge requires safe belief: a belief amounts to knowledge only if it could not easily have been held falsely. We then develop an interpretation of the modal operator in safety that allows it to non-trivially embed information-sensitive contents. The resulting theory avoids various paradoxes that (...)
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  26. A Cumulative Case Argument for Infallibilism.Nevin Climenhaga - 2021 - In Christos Kyriacou & Kevin Wallbridge (eds.), Skeptical Invariantism Reconsidered. Routledge.
    I present a cumulative case for the thesis that we only know propositions that are certain for us. I argue that this thesis can easily explain the truth of eight plausible claims about knowledge: -/- (1) There is a qualitative difference between knowledge and non-knowledge. (2) Knowledge is valuable in a way that non-knowledge is not. (3) Subjects in Gettier cases do not have knowledge. (4) If S knows that P, P is part of S’s evidence. (5) If S knows (...)
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  27. Banal Skepticism and the Errors of Doubt: On Ephecticism about Rape Accusations.Georgi Gardiner - 2021 - Midwest Studies in Philosophy 45:393-421.
    Ephecticism is the tendency towards suspension of belief. Epistemology often focuses on the error of believing when one ought to doubt. The converse error—doubting when one ought to believe—is relatively underexplored. This essay examines the errors of undue doubt. I draw on the relevant alternatives framework to diagnose and remedy undue doubts about rape accusations. Doubters tend to invoke standards for belief that are too demanding, for example, and underestimate how farfetched uneliminated error possibilities are. They mistake seeing how incriminating (...)
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  28. A strictly stronger relative must.Christopher Gauker - 2021 - Thought: A Journal of Philosophy 10 (2):82-89.
    It is widely accepted that when ‘might’ expresses certain kinds of relative modality, the sentence ‘p and it might not be the case that p’ is in some sense inconsistent. It has proven difficult to define a formal semantics that explicates this inconsistency while meeting certain other desiderata, in particular, that p does not imply ‘Must p’. This paper presents such a semantics. The key idea is that background contexts have to have multiple levels, including an inner set consisting of (...)
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  29. Evil twins and the multiverse: distinguishing the world of difference between epistemic and physical possibility.Mark Satta - 2021 - Synthese 198 (2):1153-1160.
    Physicists Brian Greene and Max Tegmark both make variants of the claim that if the universe is infinite and matter is roughly uniformly distributed, then there are infinitely many “people with the same appearance, name and memories as you, who play out every possible permutation of your life choices.” In this paper I argue that--while our current best theories in astrophysics may allow one to conclude that we have infinitely many duplicates whose lives are identical to our own from start (...)
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  30. Realism, reliability, and epistemic possibility: on modally interpreting the Benacerraf–Field challenge.Brett Topey - 2021 - Synthese 199 (1-2):4415-4436.
    A Benacerraf–Field challenge is an argument intended to show that common realist theories of a given domain are untenable: such theories make it impossible to explain how we’ve arrived at the truth in that domain, and insofar as a theory makes our reliability in a domain inexplicable, we must either reject that theory or give up the relevant beliefs. But there’s no consensus about what would count here as a satisfactory explanation of our reliability. It’s sometimes suggested that giving such (...)
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  31. The Range of Reasons: In Ethics and Epistemology.Daniel Whiting - 2021 - Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
    This book contributes to two debates and it does so by bringing them together. The first is a debate in metaethics concerning normative reasons, the considerations that serve to justify a person’s actions and attitudes. The second is a debate in epistemology concerning the norms for belief, the standards that govern a person’s beliefs and by reference to which they are assessed. The book starts by developing and defending a new theory of reasons for action, that is, of practical reasons. (...)
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  32. Two-Dimensionalism, Epistemic Possibility and Metaphysical Possibility.Jingkun Chen - 2020 - Journal of Human Cognition 4 (1):22-34.
    To reject skepticism and lay the foundation for the certainty of knowledge, Kant raised the question of how synthetic a priori proposition is possible. In his solution, the new content of knowledge comes from the syntheses of experience a posteriori, and the universal necessity of knowledge is guaranteed by it’s a priority. Under the influence of Kant, the concept of a priori and necessity has long been regarded as coextensive. But Saul Kripke believes that this will confuse different philosophical fields: (...)
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  33. Profiling and Proof: Are Statistics Safe?Georgi Gardiner - 2020 - Philosophy 95 (2):161-183.
    Many theorists hold that outright verdicts based on bare statistical evidence are unwarranted. Bare statistical evidence may support high credence, on these views, but does not support outright belief or legal verdicts of culpability. The vignettes that constitute the lottery paradox and the proof paradox are marshalled to support this claim. Some theorists argue, furthermore, that examples of profiling also indicate that bare statistical evidence is insufficient for warranting outright verdicts.I examine Pritchard's and Buchak's treatments of these three kinds of (...)
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  34. Relevance and risk: How the relevant alternatives framework models the epistemology of risk.Georgi Gardiner - 2020 - Synthese 199 (1-2):481-511.
    The epistemology of risk examines how risks bear on epistemic properties. A common framework for examining the epistemology of risk holds that strength of evidential support is best modelled as numerical probability given the available evidence. In this essay I develop and motivate a rival ‘relevant alternatives’ framework for theorising about the epistemology of risk. I describe three loci for thinking about the epistemology of risk. The first locus concerns consequences of relying on a belief for action, where those consequences (...)
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  35. Credence: A Belief-First Approach.Andrew Moon & Elizabeth Jackson - 2020 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 50 (5):652–669.
    This paper explains and defends a belief-first view of the relationship between belief and credence. On this view, credences are a species of beliefs, and the degree of credence is determined by the content of what is believed. We begin by developing what we take to be the most plausible belief-first view. Then, we offer several arguments for it. Finally, we show how it can resist objections that have been raised to belief-first views. We conclude that the belief-first view is (...)
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  36. Knowledge, justification, and (a sort of) safe belief.Daniel Whiting - 2020 - Synthese 197 (8):3593-3609.
    An influential proposal is that knowledge involves safe belief. A belief is safe, in the relevant sense, just in case it is true in nearby metaphysically possible worlds. In this paper, I introduce a distinct but complementary notion of safety, understood in terms of epistemically possible worlds. The main aim, in doing so, is to add to the epistemologist’s tool-kit. To demonstrate the usefulness of the tool, I use it to advance and assess substantive proposals concerning knowledge and justification.
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  37. The Nature of Contingency: Quantum Physics as Modal Realism.Alastair Wilson - 2020 - Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
    This book defends a radical new theory of contingency as a physical phenomenon. Drawing on the many-worlds approach to quantum theory and cutting-edge metaphysics and philosophy of science, it argues that quantum theories are best understood as telling us about the space of genuine possibilities, rather than as telling us solely about actuality. When quantum physics is taken seriously in the way first proposed by Hugh Everett III, it provides the resources for a new systematic metaphysical framework encompassing possibility, necessity, (...)
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  38. Intervals of quasi-decompositionality and mechanistic explanations.Emilio Cáceres - 2019 - Quaderns de Filosofia 6 (1):15.
    It is commonly assumed that the concept of mechanism is a keytool for the scientific understanding of observable phenomena. However, there is no single definition of mechanism in the current philosophy of science. In fact, philosophers have developed several characterizations of what seemed to be a clear intuitive concept for scientists. In this paper, I will analyze these philosophical conceptions of mechanism, highlighting their problematic aspects and proposing a new mechanistic approach based on the idea that the pertinent levels of (...)
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  39. The Reasonable and the Relevant: Legal Standards of Proof.Georgi Gardiner - 2019 - Philosophy and Public Affairs 47 (3):288-318.
    According to a common conception of legal proof, satisfying a legal burden requires establishing a claim to a numerical threshold. Beyond reasonable doubt, for example, is often glossed as 90% or 95% likelihood given the evidence. Preponderance of evidence is interpreted as meaning at least 50% likelihood given the evidence. In light of problems with the common conception, I propose a new ‘relevant alternatives’ framework for legal standards of proof. Relevant alternative accounts of knowledge state that a person knows a (...)
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  40. Two Notions of Metaphysical Modality.Antonella Mallozzi - 2018 - Synthese (Suppl 6):1-22.
    The paper explores the project of an ambitious modal epistemology that attempts to combine the a priori methods of Chalmers’ 2D semantics with Kripke’s modal metaphysics. I argue that such a project is not viable. The ambitious modal epistemology involves an inconsistent triad composed of (1) Modal Monism, (2) Two-Dimensionalism, and what I call (3) “Metaphysical Kripkeanism”. I present the three theses and show how only two of those can be true at a time. There is a fundamental incompatibility between (...)
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  41. Conceivability and Possibility.Joshua Spencer - 2018 - In Graham Oppy (ed.), The Ontological Argument (Cambridge Classic Philosophical Arguments Series). pp. 214-237.
    Some people might be tempted by modal ontological arguments from the possibility that God exists to the conclusion that God in fact exists. They might also be tempted to support the claim that possibly God exists by appealing to the conceivability of God’s existence. In this chapter, I introduce three constraints on an adequate theory of philosophical conceivability. I then consider and develop both imagination-based accounts of conceivability and conceptual coherence-based accounts of conceivability. Finally, I return to the modal ontological (...)
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  42. Epistemic Modality and Hyperintensionality in Mathematics.Timothy Bowen - 2017 - Dissertation, Arché, University of St Andrews
    This book concerns the foundations of epistemic modality and hyperintensionality and their applications to the philosophy of mathematics. I examine the nature of epistemic modality, when the modal operator is interpreted as concerning both apriority and conceivability, as well as states of knowledge and belief. The book demonstrates how epistemic modality and hyperintensionality relate to the computational theory of mind; metaphysical modality and hyperintensionality; the types of mathematical modality and hyperintensionality; to the epistemic status of large cardinal axioms, undecidable propositions, (...)
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  43. Imagining Modernity: Kant's Wager on Possibility.Augustin Dumont - 2017 - Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 38 (1):53-86.
    In the introduction to the Critique of Pure Reason (2nd edition), Kant claims that a transcendental cognition is a one ‘that is occupied not so much with objects but rather with our mode of cognition of objects insofar as is this ought to be possible a priori (a priori möglich sein soll)’. In this paper, I argue that Kant scholarship should take into account the specific signification of the term ‘sollen’, which might require us to reconsider the usual distinction between (...)
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  44. Leonard Nelson and Metaphysical Knowledge against the Neo-Kantian Background.Tomasz Kubalica - 2017 - Diametros 52:64-80.
    Leonard Nelson is known primarily as a critic of epistemology in the Neo-Kantian meaning of the term. The aim of this paper is to investigate the presuppositions and consequences of his critique. I claim that what has rarely been discussed in this context is the problem of the possibility of metaphysics. By the impossibility of epistemology Nelson means the possibility of metaphysical knowledge. I intend to devote this paper to the analysis of this problem in relation to the Neo-Kantian background.
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  45. The Future of Epistemic Possibility.Meagan Lowell Phillips - 2017 - Kriterion - Journal of Philosophy 31 (1):45-62.
    I am concerned with epistemic possibility expressions (EPEs) such as “It might be raining.” Much of the discussion of EPEs has concerned the fact that a given EPE can seem true in one context and false in another. Motivated by this data, contextualists have argued that modal expressions are sensitive to information at a context of use. Contextualist analyses encounter problems when it comes to disagreements centered on EPEs. Relativists such as John MacFarlane argue that epistemic modals are sensitive to (...)
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  46. Strong Epistemic Possibility and Evidentiality.Katrina Przyjemski - 2017 - Topoi 36 (1):183-195.
    The paper distinguishes between weak and strong epistemic possibility and argues that the notion of strong epistemic possibility is the key to solving some of the most vexing puzzles about the semantics of epistemic modality.
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  47. Tracing the Territory. A Unitary Foundationalist Account.Olga Ramírez Calle & Olga Ramirez - 2017 - Logos and Episteme 8 (1):71-95.
    The paper offers an integrative interpretation of the different lines of thought Wittgenstein was inspecting in On Certainty and what he might have been looking for through them. It suggests that we may have been focusing our attention too strongly in the wrong place and comes to a new conclusion about where the real import of these reflections lies. This leads to an answer to the initially posed question of Foundationalism that revises the way in which there can be said (...)
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  48. Evolutionism: Logic, Language and Thought.Alexandru Anghelescu - 2016 - Procedia Environmental Sciences 2016 (32):184 – 189.
    Do other earthly forms of life evolved to the level of intelligent life? Cancer and resistance to antibiotics obliged to ask this question. Signs of intelligence are found at its simplest levels. We try to see if logic is used at these levels. Peter of Spain’s suppositio materialis is applied to the chemical signals of cells. Dynamic Logic is used to understand these chemical communications. <System of communications> is used, instead of “language”. The development of life appears as the development (...)
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  49. Hawthorne’s might-y failure: a reply to “Knowledge and epistemic necessity”.Nick Colgrove & Trent Dougherty - 2016 - Philosophical Studies 173 (5):1165-1177.
    In “Knowledge and epistemic necessity,” John Hawthorne gives a defense of what he rightly calls the “standard approach” to epistemic possibility against what he calls a new “competing idea” presented by Dougherty and Rysiew which he notes has been “endorsed and elaborated upon” by Fantl and McGrath. According to the standard approach, roughly, p is epistemically possible for S if S doesn’t know that not-p. The new approach has it that p is epistemically possible if p has a non-zero epistemic (...)
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  50. Rationally held ‘P, but I fully believe ~P and I am not equivocating’.Bryan Frances - 2016 - Philosophical Studies 173 (2):309-313.
    One of Moore’s paradoxical sentence types is ‘P, but I believe ~P’. Mooreans have assumed that all tokens of that sentence type are absurd in some way: epistemically, pragmatically, semantically, or assertively. And then they proceed to debate what the absurdity really is. I argue that if one has the appropriate philosophical views, then one can rationally assert tokens of that sentence type, and one can be epistemically reasonable in the corresponding compound belief as well.
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