Discrimination is a central epistemic capacity but typically, theories of discrimination only use discrimination as a vehicle for analyzing knowledge. This paper aims at developing a self-contained theory of discrimination. Internalist theories of discrimination fail since there is no compelling correlation between discriminatory capacities and experiences. Moreover, statistical reliabilist theories are also flawed. Only a modal theory of discrimination is promising. Versions of sensitivity and adherence that take particular alternatives into account provide necessary and sufficient conditions on (...) discrimination. Safety in contrast is not sufficient for discrimination as there are cases of safety that are clearly instances of discrimination failure. The developed account of discrimination between objects will be extended to discrimination between kinds and between types. (shrink)

Gettier's reminder that knowledge cannot be identified with justified true belief started a heated debate about what knowledge really is.

'Concept' is a central notion in modern philosophy. This book deals with the philosopher Aristotle to compare modern theories of 'concepts' as he is said to be the predecessor both of classical theory and of modal theories of 'concepts' in the modern debate. Both pathêma and logos are central to his theory of language, thought, and concepts.

Proof Theory of Modal Logic is devoted to a thorough study of proof systems for modal logics, that is, logics of necessity, possibility, knowledge, belief, time, computations etc. It contains many new technical results and presentations of novel proof procedures. The volume is of immense importance for the interdisciplinary fields of logic, knowledge representation, and automated deduction.

The topic of a priori knowledge is approached through the theory of evidence. A shortcoming in traditional formulations of moderate rationalism and moderate empiricism is that they fail to explain why rational intuition and phenomenal experience count as basic sources of evidence. This explanatory gap is filled by modal reliabilism -- the theory that there is a qualified modal tie between basic sources of evidence and the truth. This tie to the truth is then explained by the (...) theory of concept possession: this tie is a consequence of what, by definition, it is to possess (i.e., to understand) one’s concepts. A corollary of the overall account is that the a priori disciplines (logic, mathematics, philosophy) can be largely autonomous from the empirical sciences. (shrink)

Many theories assimilate the idioms of modality to those of quantification; they hold that so-and-so is possible iff there is a "world" at which it is true that so-and-so. "Modal realism" identifies worlds with certain concrete particulars, and truth at a world with what is true of it. Rival "ersatz" theories identify worlds with certain abstract entities and identify what is true at them with what they represent. ;David Lewis argues that pre-theoretic modal intuitions are best explained by modal (...) realism. I try to make a case for ersatzism. ;First, I argue that modal realism is flawed on the grounds that it entails the impossibility of certain intuitively possible spatiotemporal structures; it fails to explain fully even those intuitions with which it is compatible; and it renders the origin of modal knowledge mysterious. ;Next, I argue that objections to ersatzism are not conclusive. ;Lewis objects that even a generic version of ersatzism requires an unnameable and maybe unintelligible primitive relation. I suggest that the problems with naming are perfectly general; they have nothing to do with metaphysical theories of modality in particular. And I suggest a solution taken from Lewis himself. I also argue that any purported unintelligibility is due to illegitimately assimilating the relation to spatiotemporal relations. ;Finally, I consider some difficulties with a version of ersatzism that aims to reduce modality to impure set-theory. One concerns the accommodation of intuitions about properties that are not, but might have been, instantiated. Another concerns accommodation of intuitions about relations of exclusion and entailment among properties. I suggest that these difficulties are due to faulty assumptions about the nature of properties rather than any fundamental flaws in this ersatz approach. So I propose an account of properties that when incorporated into ersatzism circumvents these difficulties and allows it to claim the advantages of modal realism without its drawbacks. Unlike traditional accounts, this takes the essence of a property to consist in its role in imposing a certain classificational structure on the particulars that instantiate it, rather than in any unique and irreducible "quiddity". (shrink)

The word "modem" in the title of this book refers primarily to post-medieval discussions, but it also hints at those medieval mo dal theories which were considered modem in contradistinction to ancient conceptions and which in different ways influenced philosophical discussions during the early modem period. The me dieval developments are investigated in the opening paper, 'The Foundations of Modality and Conceivability in Descartes and His Predecessors', by Lilli Alanen and Simo Knuuttila. Boethius's works from the early sixth century (...) belonged to the sources from which early medieval thinkers obtained their knowledge of ancient thought. They offered extensive discus sions of traditional modal conceptions the basic forms of which were: (1) the paradigm of possibility as a potency striving to realize itself; (2) the "statistical" interpretation of modal no tions where necessity means actuality in all relevant cases or omnitemporal actuality, possibility means actuality in some rel evant cases or sometimes, and impossibility means omnitemporal non-actuality; and (3) the "logical" definition of possibility as something which, being assumed, results in nothing contradic tory. Boethius accepted the Aristotelian view according to which total possibilities in the first sense must prove their met tle through actualization and possibilities in the third sense are assumed to be realized in our actual history. On these presump tions, all of the above-mentioned ancient paradigms imply the Principle of Plenitude according to which no genuine possibility remains unrealized. (shrink)

The papers collected in this volume exemplify some of the trends in current approaches to logic, language and computation. Written by authors with varied academic backgrounds, the contributions are intended for an interdisciplinary audience. The first part of this volume addresses issues relevant for multi-agent systems: reasoning with incomplete information, reasoning about knowledge and beliefs, and reasoning about games. Proofs as formal objects form the subject of Part II. Topics covered include: contributions on logical frameworks, linear logic, and different (...) approaches to formalized reasoning. Part III focuses on representations and formal methods in linguistic theory, addressing the areas of comparative and temporal expressions, modal subordination, and compositionality. (shrink)

The article deals with infinitary modal logic. We first discuss the difficulties related to the development of a satisfactory proof theory and then we show how to overcome these problems by introducing a labelled sequent calculus which is sound and complete with respect to Kripke semantics. We establish the structural properties of the system, namely admissibility of the structural rules and of the cut rule. Finally, we show how to embed common knowledge in the infinitary calculus and we (...) discuss first-order extensions of infinitary modal logic. (shrink)

The Meno problem, asking for the surplus value of knowledge beyond the value of true justified belief, was recently much treated within reliabilist and virtue epistemologies. The answers from formal epistemology, by contrast, are quite poor. This paper attempts to improve the score of formal epistemology by precisely explicating Timothy Williamson's suggestion that ‘present knowledge is less vulnerable than mere present true belief to rational undermining by future evidence’. It does so by combining Nozick's sensitivity analysis of (...) class='Hi'>knowledge with Spohn's fact‐asserting epistemic interpretation of conditionals. Accordingly, the surplus value of knowledge lies in a specific kind of stability of knowledge, which differs, though, from that claimed by other so‐called stability analyses of knowledge. (shrink)

Possibilistic logic and modal logic are knowledge representation frameworks sharing some common features, such as the duality between possibility and necessity, and the decomposability of necessity for conjunctions, as well as some obvious differences since possibility theory is graded. At the semantic level, possibilistic logic relies on possibility distributions and modal logic on accessibility relations. In the last 30 years, there have been a series of attempts for bridging the two frameworks in one way or another. In this (...) paper, we compare the relational semantics of epistemic logics with simpler possibilistic semantics of a fragment of such logics that only uses modal formulas of depth 1. This minimal epistemic logic handles both all-or-nothing beliefs and explicitly ignored facts. We also contrast epistemic logic with the S5-based rough set logic. Finally, this paper presents extensions of generalized possibilistic logic with objective and non-nested multimodal formulas, in the style of modal logics KD45 and S5. (shrink)

The concept of God is studied using the ontological argument of Anselm of Canterbury that proves God’s existence using a syllogism based on ontology. Unlike metaphysical arguments that demonstrate the existence of God through the study of being and its attributes, the ontological argument aims to reach this same goal based on a concept of God by means of the idea of an entity “greater than anything that can be conceived”. Descartes’ influence highlighted some of the philosophical difficulties with the (...) inherent dualism implicit in ontology. Logic does not say whether ideas are true or false, as Logic is concerned with right or wrong inference. We take a non-dualist approach in contrast to some of the approaches reviewed. To investigate belief and faith, a modal logical formalization is used, especially modal logic S5, which we find appropriate for presenting arguments. While mathematics and logic can convince, they do not help one to believe in God. This can make us think that reason is not enough to accept God, one must have faith to have access to Him. The relation between reason and faith needs clarification, and the ontological argument requires an unsustainable dualism. (shrink)

In frameworks in which _topic-__theoretic_ considerations—_e.g._, tracking _subject-matter_ or _topic_—are given equal importance with _veridical_ considerations, assigning topics to formulae in a satisfactory way is of critical importance. While intuitions are more-or-less solid for _extensional_ formulae in a propositional language, arriving at a compelling account of the subject-matter of _intensional_ formulae, _i.e._, formulae including intensional operators, is more challenging. This paper continues previous work on modeling topics of intensional formulae in William Parry’s logic of analytic implication, adapting the general techniques (...) to the framework of _topic-sensitive intentional modals_ (TSIMs) championed by Francesco Berto and his collaborators. As illustrations, we introduce variations on Berto and Peter Hawke’s logic of knowability relative to information ( \(\pmb {\textsf{KRI}}\) ), including a refinement sensitive to topic-theoretic distinctions between knowledge and belief and a refinement capable of internalizing its own properties. Finally, subsystems of Aybüke Ozgun and Berto’s logic of plain hyperintensional belief ( \(\pmb {\textsf{PHB}}\) ) are introduced in which fine-grained distinctions in subject-matter are possible. (shrink)

Indispensability arguments are used as a way of working out what there is: our best science tells us what things there are. Some philosophers think that indispensability arguments can be used to show that we should be committed to the existence of mathematical objects (numbers, functions, sets). Do indispensability arguments also deliver conclusions about the modal properties of these mathematical entities? Colyvan (in Leng, Paseau, Potter (eds) Mathematical knowledge, OUP, Oxford, 109-122, 2007) and Hartry Field (Realism, mathematics and (...) class='Hi'>modality, Blackwell, Oxford, 1989) each suggest that a consequence of the empirical methodology of indispensability arguments is that the resulting mathematical objects can only be said to exist (or not exist) contingently. Kristie Miller has argued that this line of thought doesn’t work (Miller in Erkenntnis, 77 (3), 335-359, 2012). Miller argues that indispensability arguments are in direct tension with contingentism about mathematical objects, and that they cannot tell us about the modal status of mathematical objects. I argue that Miller’s argument is crucially imprecise, and that the best way of making it clearer no longer shows that the indispensability strategy collapses or is unstable if it delivers contingentist conclusions about what there is. (shrink)

Imagine that you’ve just spent the last several months reading Don Quixote—and that you’re all but fifty pages away from finishing. Unfortunately for you, the book was due back before you could finish, and so begrudgingly, you turn it back in, having not known what happens in the end. Riddled with curiosity, you make your best guess about Quixote’s eventual fate and suppose it is the most likely scenario. Entirely unbeknownst to you, it turns out that you were right; Quixote’s (...) ultimate destiny was just what you had supposed it would be! What luck! Quite naturally, we would say that, when all is said and done, knowing what happens to Don Quixote in the end is surely better than merely believing truly what happens in the end—the predicament you find yourself in having not actually finished the book. After all, it was just by dumb luck that you guessed the ending right—a point you could deny only on the pain of some embarrassing claim of clairvoyance. We might put the idea more generally by saying that from a purely cognitive standpoint, it is better to know the truth than to stumble upon it by luck. This general idea betrays two distinct insights about knowledge. The first is the insight that while true belief is valuable, knowledge is distinctively so—knowing the truth is valuable in a way that merely having a true belief is not. The second insight here is that you lack knowledge if it’s just by dumb luck that the belief you have is true. Call these the value insight and the anti-luck insight: Value insight: Knowledge is distinctively valuable. Luck insight: Knowledge excludes luck. In contemporary epistemology, and especially over the past five years, separate projects have arisen in correspondence with these distinct intuitions: value-driven epistemology is concerned with issues surrounding the first insight, and projects under the description of anti-luck epistemology have arisen out of the second. Now we might reasonably suppose that whatever it is that makes knowledge relevantly un-lucky would be something we could cite in accounting for what makes knowledge distinctively valuable. This natural idea reflects the thought that the insights about value and luck should not be entirely disconnected. There is a problematic tension though between this reasonable expectation and the resources epistemologists have provided for us to accommodate it. What explains the tension is the fact that value-driven and anti-luck projects in epistemology have by and large been developed apart from each other, each focused on one of our two guiding insights at the expense of the other. Consequently, value-driven epistemology’s focus on the normative but not modal properties of knowledge leaves these two aspects of knowledge disconnected much in the way that anti-luck epistemology’s focus on the modal but not the normative properties of knowledge leaves these same aspects disconnected. The lacuna here between what value driven epistemologists tell us about what makes knowledge valuable and what the anti-luck epistemologists tell us about what makes knowledge exclude luck is troubling. We may resist that there should be such a disconnect if we avoid the common flaw shared by each of these projects pursued in isolation from the other. The flaw here is essentially one of naivety: that of supposing that we can give an account of knowledge exclusively in terms of conditions that would accommodate one of the two insights, while still managing to account for the other insight—which itself we did not appeal to directly in our theory of what knowledge is—e.g. in the analysis provided of it. This is the flaw behind the value-driven approaches that think about knowledge in terms of valuable properties they can’t explain to ensure modal robustness and the anti-luck projects that think of knowledge in terms of modal properties into which we can’t well smuggle the normativity needed to explain its value. To avoid this flaw, then, we should let both of these insights dictate the conditions our analysis offers as essential to knowing. The project with which I’ll be engaging here develops substantially on this widely overlooked and promising idea. (shrink)

Modal logic has been applied in many different areas, as reasoning about time, knowledge and belief, necessity and possibility, to mention only some examples. In the present paper, an attempt is made to use modal logic to account for the semantics of theoretical sentences in scientific language. Theoretical sentences have been studied extensively since the work of Ramsey and Carnap. The present attempt at a modal analysis is motivated by there being several intended interpretations of the theoretical terms once (...) these terms are introduced through the axioms of a theory. (shrink)

In Pantsar, an outline for an empirically feasible epistemological theory of arithmetic is presented. According to that theory, arithmetical knowledge is based on biological primitives but in the resulting empirical context develops an essentially a priori character. Such contextual a priori theory of arithmetical knowledge can explain two of the three characteristics that are usually associated with mathematical knowledge: that it appears to be a priori and objective. In this paper it is argued that (...) it can also explain the third one: why arithmetical knowledge appears to be necessary. A Kripkean analysis of necessity is used as an example to show that a proper analysis of the relevant possible worlds can explain arithmetical necessity in a sufficiently strong form. (shrink)

In Pantsar (2014), an outline for an empirically feasible epistemological theory of arithmetic is presented. According to that theory, arithmetical knowledge is based on biological primitives but in the resulting empirical context develops an essentially a priori character. Such contextual a priori theory of arithmetical knowledge can explain two of the three characteristics that are usually associated with mathematical knowledge: that it appears to be a priori and objective. In this paper it is argued (...) that it can also explain the ... (shrink)

Modality: A History provides readers a sweeping study of the history of philosophical work on modal concepts. Everyday discourse is saturated with appeals to what might be the case or to what must be true or to what cannot happen. Possibility, necessity, and impossibility are modal terms, and philosophers have long wondered how to best understand them. This volume traces the history of some of the most prominent and important contributions to our understanding of possibility and necessity over the (...) past two and half millennia of western philosophy, from ancient Greek philosophers through current debates in the 21st century. Over the course of nine chapters from prominent scholars, this volume traces a history of modal theorizing that begins with extended discussions of Aristotle and the Stoics. Several chapters discuss insights and disagreements among Latin, Arabic, and Jewish medieval scholastics, such as Al-Ghazâlî, Scotus, and Crescas. Three chapters center on early modern philosophers, whose modal views were deeply shaped by this conceptual inheritance but also departed from it in significant ways: Descartes, Malebranche, Locke, Spinoza, Leibniz, and Hume. Kant and Hegel's modal contributions are presented in their own chapter, and another chapter traces the legacy of Kant's account on early-to-mid 20th century modal views, including Husserl, Heidegger, Russell, and Quine. The revival of modal metaphysics in the more recent work of Kripke, Marcus, and Lewis has led to a new flourishing of modal theories, including in recent debates among neo-Aristotelians, as the final chapter illustrates. Although modal concepts are interesting and important on their own, theories of modality often intersect with other significant philosophical topics, such as time, freedom, and God. Modal concepts also extend beyond metaphysics. To illustrate the role of modality in other domains, several small-scale studies, or Reflections, are dispersed among these main chapters on modality in cosmology, religion, music, literature, and logic. Readers will learn how a seemingly timeless and changeless cluster of modal concepts have undergone significant revisions and enjoy a rich developmental history. (shrink)

Examining afresh the 16th-century style of mannerism, Sjoerd van Tuinen synthesises philosophy and aesthetics to demonstrate not only the contemporary relevance of mannerism but its broader significance as a form of modal thinking. Beyond a style of art that spurned the balance and proportion of earlier Renaissance painting in favour of compositional instability and tension, this book looks a-historically at mannerism to investigate what it can tell us about continental modal metaphysics, focusing in particular on its artificial and what Van (...) Tuinen calls 'secondary' nature. In three main parts, Van Tuinen first explores the ontology, aesthetics and ethics of mannerism. He then develops this through an extended study of Leibniz as a modal and indeed mannerist philosopher, before outlining in the final part a (neo)-mannerist aesthetics that incorporates diagrammatics, alchemy and contemporary technologies of speculative design. Drawing on Bergson, Simondon, Deleuze, Stengers and Agamben, together with artworks from Lomazzo to Arcimboldo, The Philosophy of Mannerism uncovers the rich new pathways created by the combination of philosophy, art history and contemporary theory. (shrink)

Everything we know about what goes on in the world comes to us through reports, information transmitted through human communication. We rely on reports, which can take any number of forms, to convey useful information, and we derive knowledge from that information. It's no surprise, then, that reporting has many philosophical dimensions. Because it plays such a major role in knowledge management, as Nicholas Rescher argues, the epistemology of reporting not only deserves our attention but also sheds important (...) light on how we understand the theory of knowledge. This book offers a clear, accessible introduction to the theory of reporting, with a special emphasis on national security, particularly military and diplomatic reporting, drawing on examples from historical accounts of espionage and statecraft from the Second World War. Rescher explores the various issues and problems related to the production and reception of reports - including reporter expertise and trustworthiness, transmission modalities, confidentiality, cognitive importance, and the interpretation, evaluation, and utilization of reports - providing readers with a distinctive and well organized philosophical clarification of some central features of the theory of reporting. (shrink)

Education and the collective construction of knowledge. An overview -- Teaching modality : a corpus analysis of the use of must by university Spanish learners of English -- Motivation and anxiety towards mathematical learning in primary education -- Criteria for the sequencing of contemporary music in education -- Sustainability training evaluation of Spanish university students -- Art as a means of fostering peace, communication and freedom of expression from childhood -- Culturemes vs. humoremes as translation problems in practice (...) exemplified in the German Cabaret of Marc-Uwe Kling and his Kangaroo stories -- Is there homogeneity among business students regarding the level of concern towards the sustainable development goals? A cluster analysis -- Use trends and methodological pertinence of Delphi within educational research in IberoAmerica : a systematic review in Scopus -- Gamification in the improvement of speaking competences in the English as a foreign language classroom : a case study -- Quality management in the Spanish university : an analysis of the success and performance rates in communication degree programs -- Teacher stories from the future : technology for the language and literature classroom. (shrink)

The paper explores applications of Kripke's theory of truth to semantics for anti-luck epistemology, that is, to subjunctive theories of knowledge. Subjunctive theories put forward modal or subjunctive conditions to rule out knowledge by mere luck as to be found in Gettier-style counterexamples to the analysis of knowledge as justified true belief. Because of the subjunctive nature of these conditions the resulting semantics turns out to be non-monotone, even if it is based on non-classical evaluation schemes (...) such as strong Kleene or FDE. This blocks the usual road to fixed-point results for Kripke's theory of truth within these semantics and consequently the paper is predominantly an exploration of fixed point results for Kripke's theory of truth within non-monotone semantics. Using the theory of quasi-inductive definitions we show that in case of the subjunctive theories of knowledge the so-called Kripke jump will have fixed points despite the non-monotonicity of the semantics: Kripke's theory of truth can be successfully applied in the framework of subjunctive theories of knowledge. (shrink)

Keith Hossack's thesis is that knowledge is a conceptually primitive and metaphysically fundamental relation between a mind and a fact. He argues that in terms of the simple relation of knowledge we can analyze central notions of epistemology, of semantics, of modality and a priori knowledge, of psychology, and of linguistics. He does so in a framework that includes a fairly rich faculty psychology and that stresses causation: knowledge can be caused by belief, but because (...) knowledge is simple, it is not any kind of belief. He regards his enterprise as metaphysics, and he proceeds in a rather grand manner. The beginning of his Preface might remind one of the opening paragraphs of Leibniz's The Monadology.If knowledge is a simple relation between minds and facts, then we want to know a bit about facts. Hossack takes facts to consist in universals being instantiated among things. He favours a view of universals as respects in which things resemble each other, but his theory is at least officially silent about which universals exist, leaving that as a matter for scientific inquiry. But he takes metaphysics to be a science. Here he is being coy, and it is worth making out how. Hossack uses multigrade relations; these are relations of no fixed polyadicity that for any natural number n may be instantiated by n things. Vectors are bearers of such relations. The relation among working men of uniting to form a union is a multigrade relation, and the founders of the International Workers of the World are a vector bearing this relation. (shrink)

We discuss first order theories in which individual concepts are admitted as mathematical objects along with the things that reify them. This allows very straightforward formalizations of knowledge, belief, wanting, and necessity in ordinary first order logic without modal operators. Applications are given in philosophy and in artificial intelligence. We do not treat general concepts, and we do not present any full axiomatizations but rather show how various facts can be expressed.

This thesis develops a theory about the structure of modal judgment and knowledge. Arguing in favour of pluralism about the source of modal knowledge, it focuses on the questions of the varieties of modal judgment and their relations, the function of modal judgment and the scope of modal knowledge. It offers a hypothesis about the development of the framework of modal knowledge, grounding it on the capacity to evaluate temporal judgments, from which the capacity to (...) evaluate alternatives comes from, and it suggests that the most basic framework of modal judgments consists in that of agentive modality, and in particular, about what one can do, and how. Then, it is argued that the rest of the framework of modal judgment can be developed on this basis, although this imposes certain restrictions about the scope of modal knowledge. Additionally, the thesis provides analyses of various agentive modal notions, such as imaginability, what is a way to do something, and discusses how to understand counterfactuals with impossible antecedents. (shrink)

The question "What is the good life?" is perhaps the most basic question in all of ethics. The four major paradigms of the good life that have been proposed by various philosophers are: (1) hedonism, (2) various forms of desire-satisfactionism, (3) objective value pluralism, and (4) the hybrid theory--i.e., a combination of (1) and (3). In my dissertation, I critique the leading accounts of flourishing (or wellbeing) and defend an objective value pluralistic theory of flourishing that is based (...) on what I call the "Capacities View of Flourishing" (CVF). According to the central evaluative axiom of the CVF, the flourishing of any creature consists in the development and exercise of the capacities that are essential to that kind of creature. While the basic idea behind the CVF has appealed to an impressive list of philosophers from ancient to modern times, the purported explanatory grounds upon which it is based (about what makes a capacity essential to a given kind of creature) has been difficult to explicate. After considering various popular proposals of what it is for a capacity to be essential to a given kind of creature and showing why they are defective in different ways, I propose a novel modal interpretation of the notion of an essential capacity that is immune to the problems of the other popular accounts. According to the modal interpretation of the CVF, the flourishing of a kind of creature K consists in the development and exercise of the capacities that are necessary to K (i.e., that are required for membership in the class K). In the case of human beings more specifically, I argue that there are four basic capacities that are jointly necessary for membership in the class 'human being.' These are the capacity to know (cognition), the capacity to desire (conation), the capacity to feel (feeling), and the capacity to act (agency). And in the last crucial stage of my defense of the modal interpretation of the CVF, I show how four widely recognized objective goods of knowledge, virtue, pleasure, and achievement are the ideal states of the four basic human capacities of cognition, conation, feeling, and agency. I conclude my defense of objective value pluralism by responding to a famous argument against the objectivity of values: the so-called "argument from relativity." In response to this argument, I first show how the objectivity of values is compatible with a moderate form of (non-conventionalist) evaluative relativism that recognizes a plurality of human goods that are not subsumable under a "unitary" true good. I then argue that the hypothesis that there is a plurality of objective human goods is a better inference to the best explanation of the diversity of human values than the hypothesis that there are no objective human goods at all. Lastly, I show why objective value skepticism has absurd implications as it entails that nothing is genuinely good or bad for anyone. The overall conclusion of my dissertation is that of the leading paradigms of the good life, an objective value pluralistic account of flourishing that explains why certain states are good for us by virtue of their being the ideal realization of the capacities that are essential to us is not only deeply appealing, but on closer scrutiny, the most viable theory of flourishing available. (shrink)

Some philosophers think that a person can justifi ably believe that p is possible even though she has no theory according to which p is possible. They think, for example, that she can justifiably believe that there could be naturally purple elephants even though she lacks (inter alia) a theory about the factors germane to elephant pigmentation. There is a certain optimism about this view: it seems to assume that people are fairly good at ferreting out problems with (...) proposed modal claims; so, if a person doesn’t detect one, then she’s within her rights to assume that there is no problem to be found. I am suspicious of this optimism, but I do not have space to challenge it here. Instead, I want to outline the more pessimistic alternative. Suppose that a person is not justified in believing that p is possible unless she has a theory according to which p is possible. How might such an account be developed? My aim is to map out this neglected option. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Knowledge and Analysis The Relation Between Prior and Posterior Analytics Syllogistic Interpretations of Aristotle's Syllogistic Logic Knowledge of Facts Aristotelian Causes Demonstration Principles Definitions and Demonstrations Necessity Science and Dialectic Fallibility Applicability Readings of Aristotle's Theory of Science Epistemological Status of the Analytics Bibliography.

In this paper, I propose a new way of understanding the space of possibilities in the field of mental content. The resulting map assigns separate locations to theories of content that have generally been lumped together on the more traditional map. Conversely, it clusters together some theories of content that have typically been regarded as occupying opposite poles. I make my points concrete by developing a taxonomy of theories of mental content, but the main points of the paper concern not (...) merely how to classify, but how to understand, the theories. Also, though the paper takes theories of mental content as a case study, much of the discussion is applicable to theories of other phenomena. To a first approximation, the difference between the traditional and the proposed taxonomies turns on whether we classify theories of content by, on the one hand, their implications for a non-redundant supervenience base for content facts (i.e., for facts about what contents thoughts have) or, on the other, by their constitutive accounts of content. By a "constitutive account," I mean the kind of elucidation of the nature of a phenomenon that theorists have tried to give for, for example, knowledge, justice, personal identity, consciousness, convention, heat, and limit. The tendency to taxonomize by supervenience base is encouraged, I suggest, by a failure to keep clearly in view a distinction between constitutive and modal determination. Many philosophers would accept that a constitutive account cannot be captured in purely modal terms. Giving a constitutive account is not the same as specifying modally necessary and sufficient conditions. Nevertheless, philosophers often try to cash constitutive claims in modal terms. A case in point is that theories of content tend to be conceptualized in terms of the theories' implications for a supervenience base for content facts. My thesis goes beyond the by-now somewhat familiar proposition that not all modal determinants of a phenomenon are constitutive determinants. One who has taken that point on board might nevertheless conceive of a philosophical account as an attempt to specify constitutive determinants of the target phenomenon that make up a non-redundant supervenience base for the phenomenon. Shoehorning a philosophical account into this form leaves out elements that are modally redundant, but may be explanatorily or ontologically significant. For example, when a constitutive account has multiple levels, the different levels will typically be modally redundant. Formulating the account as a specification of a supervenience base of constitutive determinants will therefore flatten the account into a single level. Many of my arguments can be illustrated by considering the place of normativity in the theory of content. The new taxonomy gives a distinct niche to normative theories of content - theories that explain a thought's having a certain content at least in part in terms of the obtaining of normative facts. By contrast, on a traditional map, normative theories are invisible as such because normative facts supervene on non-normative ones. (shrink)

The stated subject of these lecture courses given by Husserlbetween 1910 and 1918is ‘reason, the word for the mental activities and accomplishments that govern knowledge, give it form and supply it with norms.’ They show their author still pursuing the course set out in the Logical Investigations up to the end of the second decade of the century and displaying utter consistency with stands that he began taking on meaning, analyticity, Platonism, manifolds, mathematics, psychologism, etc. in the 1890s. Thus, (...) they undermine many idées reçues about the development of his thought. The centerpiece of this work is an exploration of the realm of meaning. Moreover, they add new dimensions to standard discussions by taking readers back to the place where phenomenology and analytic philosophy diverged. They show that Husserl tangled long and hard with the very ideas that went into the making of the latter and offer a wealth of interesting insights into sense and meaning, theory of judgment, complete and incomplete meanings, states of affairs, extensional logic, the relationship between logic and mathematics, functions and arguments, propositional functions, quantification, existential generalization, the word ‘all,’ number theory, sets, modality, deductive theory, ideas that are still under discussion today. Prepared for oral delivery in the classroom, they are refreshingly lively and spontaneous. They are clearer, more explicit, and readable than the books Husserl published during his lifetime. (shrink)

In this paper we present a general theory of normal forms, based on a categorial result for the free monoid construction. We shall use the theory mainly for proposictional modal logic, although it seems to have a wider range of applications. We shall formally represent normal forms as combinatorial objects, basically labelled trees and forests. This geometric conceptualization is implicit in and our approach will extend it to other cases and make it more direct: operations of a purely (...) geometric and combinatorial nature will be introduced in order to give a mathematical description of the basic logical/algebraic constructions .We begin by recalling the above-mentioned categorial construction: we need a careful inspection of it because in the various examples considered later we plan to deduce from it in a uniform way the normal forms and the description of finitely generated free algebras. This method always works whenever we can describe the category of algebras corresponding to the logic under consideration as a T-objects category. When this simple description seems not to be available, still the general theory might be of some interest, because a description of the category of algebras as a T-objects category plus equation is possible .The central part of the paper is more advanced and specific: we show how the general approach presented here can provide some insights even in the basic case of the modal system K. Section 4 contains a contribution to the theory of normal forms, namely the description of the uniform substitution. This result will enable us to give a duality theorem for the category of finitely generated free modal algebras and in Section 5 to provide a characterization of the collections of normal forms which happen to be normal forms for a logic, thus giving a description of the lattice of modal logics.Section 6 deals with some applications: we shall show how to use normal forms in order to prove for the modal system K the definability of higher-order propositional quantifiers and of the tense operator F .As to the prerequisites, the paper is almost self-contained. The reader is only assumed to have familiarity with standard techniques in algebraic logic ). Knowledge of the basic facts about adjoint functors is required too, see e.g. McLane or the appendix. (shrink)

Interest in the metaphysics and logic of possible worlds goes back at least as far as Aristotle, but few books address the history of these important concepts. This volume offers new essays on the theories about the logical modalities held by leading philosophers from Aristotle in ancient Greece to Rudolf Carnap in the twentieth century. The story begins with an illuminating discussion of Aristotle's views on the connection between logic and metaphysics, continues through the Stoic and mediaeval traditions, and then (...) moves to the early modern period with particular attention to Locke and Leibniz. The views of Kant, Peirce, C. I. Lewis and Carnap complete the volume. Many of the essays illuminate the connection between the historical figures studied, and recent or current work in the philosophy of modality. The result is a rich and wide-ranging picture of the history of the logical modalities. (shrink)

The theory of sign and proof is an essential component of Stoic epistemology. This book examines the fragmentary evidence from Sextus Empiricus and sheds light on the two aspects that characterise signs and proofs: the logical relation that holds between a sign and that which it signifies and an additional epistemic relation that is called revelation. All signs feature in conditionals that are true in virtue of the strong modal account of conditionals that the Stoics developed. This modal account (...) is one aspect that makes it possible to gain certain knowledge of that which is signified. But signs and proofs must also reveal that which they signify to produce knowledge. This requirement is fulfilled when an inference proceeds from premises that are justified through knowledge of the causal relation in virtue of which the premises are true. (shrink)

A common criticism of Locke’s ideational definition of knowledge is that it contradicts his accounts of knowledge’s reality and sensitive knowledge. Here it is argued that the ideational definiton of knowledge is compatible with knowledge of idea-independent reality. The key is Locke’s notion of the signification. Nominal agreements obtain if and only if the ideas’ descriptive contents are the ground for truth; real agreements obtain only if their total denotation are the grounds for truth. The (...) signification of the ideas determine whether they denote real or fantastical objects. Three types of ideas, simple quality-ideas, modal ideas, and relational ideas, necessarily signify real objects. The fourth type, the ideas of substances, are real only if those particular combinations of qualitites have been perceived to co-exist. Locke’s ideas are intrinsically either real or fantastical and thus, it is argued, his models of truth and knowledge’s reality are far from typical correspondence theories. (shrink)

Keith Hossack's thesis is that knowledge is a conceptually primitive and metaphysically fundamental relation between a mind and a fact. He argues that in terms of the simple relation of knowledge we can analyze central notions of epistemology , of semantics , of modality and a priori knowledge , of psychology , and of linguistics . He does so in a framework that includes a fairly rich faculty psychology and that stresses causation: knowledge can be (...) caused by belief, but because knowledge is simple, it is not any kind of belief. He regards his enterprise as metaphysics, and he proceeds in a rather grand manner. The beginning of his Preface might remind one of the opening paragraphs of Leibniz's The Monadology.If knowledge is a simple relation between minds and facts, then we want to know a bit about facts. Hossack takes facts to consist in universals being instantiated among things. He favours a view of universals as respects in which things resemble each other , but his theory is at least officially silent about which universals exist, leaving that as a matter for scientific inquiry . But he takes metaphysics to be a science . Here he is being coy, and it is worth making out how. Hossack uses multigrade relations; these are relations of no fixed polyadicity that for any natural number n may be instantiated by n things. Vectors are bearers of such relations. The relation among working men of uniting to form a union is a multigrade relation, and the founders of the International Workers of the World are a vector bearing this relation. (shrink)

Kant was among the first philosophers to recognize that modalities come in many varieties, and that there are systematic connections among them--an insight which has since been confirmed by the multitude of applications of the basic techniques of formalized modal logic. In particular, He recognized an affinity among what are now called doxastic and epistemic logics, As well as with a logic of judging which has not exact counterpart in contemporary thought. This paper will be concerned with the explication of (...) the theory of judgment in its relation to the logics of belief and knowledge. It will seek to show that there is a clear and consistent way to translate Kant's notions of modality into modern symbolic terminology, And that the relations he took to hold among them are well-grounded in his philosophy of logic. (shrink)

Modal epistemic conditions have played an important role in post-Gettier theories of knowledge. These conditions purportedly eliminate the pernicious kind of luck present in all Gettier-type cases and offer a rather convincing way of refuting skepticism. This motivates the view that conditions of this sort are necessary for knowledge. I argue against this. I claim that modal conditions, particularly sensitivity and safety, are not necessary for knowledge. I do this by noting that the problem cases for both (...) conditions point to a problem that cannot be fixed even by a revised similarity ranking or ordering of worlds. I offer as groundwork a set theoretical analysis of the profiles of the problem cases for safety and sensitivity. I then demonstrate that these conditions fail whenever necessary links constitutive of the epistemic situation actually obtain but are not modally preserved. (shrink)

There are three primary aims of the book. The first, set out in the book's introduction, is to explain how two fairly recent developments in philosophy, externalism and modalism, provide the basis for a promising account of knowledge - an account that achieves anti-skeptical results and avoids Gettier-style counterexamples that are based on an agent having warranted beliefs that are merely luckily true. Epistemological externalism is the thesis that not all the factors that make a true belief a case (...) of knowledge need to be cognitively accessible or "internal" to the agent. Modalism, as the author construes it, is the use of possible worlds talk in clarifying what would or might be the case and what is necessarily so." "The second objective is to work through the different modalized epistemologies extant in the literature, assessing their strengths and weaknesses, with a view toward constructing a working theory. Finally, the author proposes the theory that knowledge is reliably formed, sensitive true belief, and defends the theory against objections."--Jacket. (shrink)

Knowledge modal formulas are interpreted by a universal modal world in the hypersets universe [A]. This remedies the limitation of the interpretation of knowledge formulas by a tower of modal worlds in the well founded universe [F], where each world can interpret only a portion of knowledge modal formulas.

Many metaphysical controversies can be understood as debates over whether some alleged entities are metaphysically possible. No doubt, with regard to these matters, we may have opinions or theories, commonsensical or sophisticated. But do we have knowledge of them? Can we really know that something is metaphysically possible, and if so, how? Several different answers have been offered in the literature, intending to illustrate how we may have knowledge of metaphysical modality. In this paper, I concentrate on (...) a proposal by Timothy Williamson. On this account, our alleged knowledge of metaphysical modality is justified by and grounded in our capacity to handle ordinary mundane counterfactual conditionals. However, I argue that Williamson’s account fails, mainly because the modality involved in ordinary mundane counterfactuals is causal, and thus our capacity to handle them still falls short of giving us any knowledge of metaphysical modality. In the end of the paper, I also provide my own answer to the question. My answer is a sceptical one: we do not really have knowledge of metaphysical modality. But such ignorance is harmless, or so I argue. (shrink)

This book sets out first to explain how two fairly recent developments in philosophy, externalism and modalism, provide the basis for a promising account of knowledge, and then works through the different modalized epistemologies extant in the literature, assessing their strengths and weaknesses. Finally, the author proposes the theory that knowledge is reliably formed, sensitive true belief, and defends the theory against objections.

This book collects original essays on the epistemology of modality and related issues in modal metaphysics and philosophical methodology. The contributors utilize both the newer metaphysics-first and the more traditional epistemology-first approaches to these issues. The chapters on modal epistemology mostly focus on the problem of how we can gain knowledge of possibilities, which have never been actualized, or necessities which are not provable either by logico-mathematical reasoning or by linguistic competence alone. These issues are closely related to (...) some of the central issues in philosophical methodology, notably: to what extent is the armchair methodology of philosophy a reliable guide for the formation of beliefs about what is possible and necessary. This question also relates to the nature of thought experiments that are extensively used in science and philosophy. Epistemology of Modality and Philosophical Methodology will be of interest to researchers and advanced students working on the epistemology and metaphysics of modality, as well as those whose work is concerned with philosophical methodology more generally. (shrink)

Modality - the question of what is possible and what is necessary - is a fundamental area of philosophy and philosophical research. The Routledge Handbook of Modality is an outstanding reference source to the key topics, problems and debates in this exciting subject and is the first collection of its kind. Comprising thirty-five chapters by a team of international contributors the Handbook is divided into seven clear parts: worlds and modality essentialism, ontological dependence, and modality modal (...) anti-realism epistemology of modality modality in science modality in logic and mathematics modality in the history of philosophy. Within these sections the central issues, debates and problems are examined, including possible worlds, essentialism, counterfactuals, ontological dependence, modal fictionalism, deflationism, the integration challenge, conceivability, a priori knowledge, laws of nature, natural kinds, and logical necessity. The Routledge Handbook of Modality is essential reading for students and researchers in epistemology, metaphysics and philosophy of language. It will also be very useful for those in related fields in philosophy such as philosophy of mathematics, logic and philosophy of science. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Avicenna's Theory of Science: Logic, Metaphysics, Epistemology by Riccardo StrobinoThérèse-Anne DruartRiccardo Strobino. Avicenna's Theory of Science: Logic, Metaphysics, Epistemology. Oakland: University of California Press, 2021. Pp. xvi + 428. Hardback, $95.00.Strobino's remarkable book does not simply present Avicenna's theory of science; it also highlights the importance of demonstration not only for logic but also for metaphysics and epistemology. Hence, Strobino's work is essential to appreciate (...) and better understand Avicenna's philosophy as a whole.Strobino grounds his research on Avicenna's theory of science in his Book of Demonstration in the Shifā', which focuses on Aristotle's Posterior Analytics. Taking into account the lack of any translation into English or any other main modern language as well as the lack of a full medieval Latin translation (only chapter 7 of book 3 exists in a medieval Latin version) of Avicenna's text, Strobino kindly provides in appendix C (357–71) a detailed "map" of this text, useful not only to readers who cannot handle Arabic but even to those who can, as the [End Page 326] text is so rich and complex. A simple but careful look at this map confirms what Strobino makes clear and insists upon: Avicenna greatly develops, enriches, completes, and even outgrows some of Aristotle's views. The Book of Demonstration is far more than a commentary on the Posterior Analytics; it is a complete reworking of it.Strobino shows that Avicenna grounds his theory of demonstration and science on two basic notions—conception (tasawwur) and assertion (tasdīq, which some other scholars translate as "assent")—and so gives a unified approach to his theory. Scientific conceptions require better understanding of definition and description. Avicenna builds definitions and descriptions on essentialism and, therefore, grounds them in metaphysics. As for scientific assertions, in contradistinction to nonscientific ones, they must be necessary and give the cause. Therefore, Avicenna places great importance on modality and develops modal syllogisms, whereas Aristotle focused on categorical syllogisms and neglected hypothetical and disjunctive syllogisms. Avicenna also elaborates a sophisticated account of modality and its metaphysical implications. Furthermore, he broadens and enriches the appreciation of causality and explanation. These developments, according to Strobino, lead Avicenna to set forth an intricate division and hierarchy of the sciences under metaphysics, which provides their ultimate principles and allows for a unified understanding of the sciences while respecting their particularities.According to Strobino, Avicenna is keen to develop a theory of science that gives a good account of science as it is practiced. Strobino carefully shows how Avicenna's theory better reflects this practice than does Aristotle's.Strobino does not simply highlight how much Avicenna distances himself from Aristotle and goes far beyond what the Posterior Analytics yields, but also shows how much Avicenna relies on points adumbrated by his predecessor al-Fārābī in his own Book of Demonstration.The way Strobino through his analysis of demonstration links Avicenna's understanding of logic, epistemology, and metaphysics underscores the coherence and unity of Avicenna's philosophy. Scholars were aware of the importance of demonstration for Avicenna in various philosophical fields, but until the release of this book, they seemed not to have fully grasped the centrality and essential role played by the Avicennian understanding and focus on demonstration.Of course, Strobino does not limit himself to an analysis of passages in the Book of Demonstration. He has an encompassing knowledge of Avicenna's texts and uses them well to flesh out and enrich what remains terse in the Book of Demonstration. He even takes into account the way one of his successors, al-Tūsī, reads him. He also shows an extensive and wide-ranging knowledge of Aristotle's texts and of Aristotelian scholarship, as well as an interest in the Greek commentators and Galen and their relevance for interpreting Avicenna.Avicenna's Theory of Science is not an easy book to read, as it is often very technical, particularly when dealing with purely logical points or issues, but reading it is rewarding if one does so slowly and meditatively. The author, in fact, illuminates difficult matters but does not waste words. From... (shrink)

This paper introduces a multi-modal polymorphic type theory to model epistemic processes characterized by trust, defined as a second-order relation affecting the communication process between sources and a receiver. In this language, a set of senders is expressed by a modal prioritized context, whereas the receiver is formulated in terms of a contextually derived modal judgement. Introduction and elimination rules for modalities are based on the polymorphism of terms in the language. This leads to a multi-modal non-homogeneous version of (...) a type theory, in which we show the embedding of the modal operators into standard group knowledge operators. (shrink)

An introduction to the various logics of truth and modality as part of a foundation for the construction of theories of knowledge representation. The book reviews various semantic theories and employs them as the basis for the development of logics of truth and modality.