Uniformism about the epistemology of modality is the view that there is only one basic route to modal knowledge; non-uniformism is the view that there are several. Non-uniformism is becoming an increasingly popular stance, but how can it be defended? I prise apart two ways of understanding the uniformism/non-uniformism conflict that are mixed up in the literature. I argue that once separated, it is evident that they lead up to two different non-uniformist theses that need to be argued for in (...) very different ways. In particular, one construal allows only for a weak thesis about the actual lay of the current theoretical land in modal epistemology, while the other allows for a strong thesis that can be defended without reliance on claims about the alleged goodness or badness of individual accounts of modal justification. I argue that philosophers inclined towards non-uniformism ought to go for the strong, rather than the weak, thesis. (shrink)

This paper is an exploration of the prospects of rationalist, concept-based epistemologies of modality as far as essentialist and de re modal claims are concerned. I grant certain explanatory power to such epistemologies but, primarily, I identify their limitations. I first explore them in view of the (possible) existence of general as well as of singular modally loaded concepts and find their explanatory scope severely limited. Inspired by the abstractionist's concept-and-entitlement based hybrid model, the paper then explores a similarly hybrid (...) strategy. The outcome of this exploration is that, regardless of its explanatory scope, it would be a misnomer to describe such hybrid view as concept-based. The result generalizes. (shrink)