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. (shrink)

Qualifications with 'as' or 'qua' are widely used in philosophy, yet how precisely such qualifications work is poorly understood. While extant work on the topic is rife with revisionary assumptions about the nature of individuals, truth, and identity, this article shows that no baroque theory is required to account for such qualifications. I develop and defend a simple theory on which qua-qualifications ascribe relational properties to individuals, and show that the proposal affords a clear metaphysical analysis of the puzzle cases (...) of interest. Moreover, the theory makes adequate predictions about the linguistic behaviour of qua-qualifications and helps us think more clearly about their logic. Since this is more than any extant competing theory can claim, the proposal offers the best account of qua-qualification to date. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

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. (shrink)