Switch to: References

Add citations

You must login to add citations.
  1. Knowing how things might have been.Mark Jago - 2018 - Synthese 198 (S8):1981-1999.
    I know that I could have been where you are right now and that you could have been where I am right now, but that neither of us could have been turnips or natural numbers. This knowledge of metaphysical modality stands in need of explanation. I will offer an account based on our knowledge of the natures, or essencess, of things. I will argue that essences need not be viewed as metaphysically bizarre entities; that we can conceptualise and refer to (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   15 citations  
  • Mathematics and Metaphilosophy.Justin Clarke-Doane - 2022 - Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
    This book discusses the problem of mathematical knowledge, and its broader philosophical ramifications. It argues that the problem of explaining the (defeasible) justification of our mathematical beliefs (‘the justificatory challenge’), arises insofar as disagreement over axioms bottoms out in disagreement over intuitions. And it argues that the problem of explaining their reliability (‘the reliability challenge’), arises to the extent that we could have easily had different beliefs. The book shows that mathematical facts are not, in general, empirically accessible, contra Quine, (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   5 citations  
  • (1 other version)The Blurred Line between Epistemic and Metaphysical Modalities in the Modal Epistemology of Imagination.Iñaki Xavier Larrauri Pertierra - manuscript
    Modal epistemologies that rely on a fallibilism about modal claims have been gaining traction over the years. This paper critically discusses the accounts of Kung (2009; 2010; 2016) and Dohrn (2018; 2019; 2020) and argues that they are invariably susceptible to being read as entailing claims of epistemic possibility. Both Kung and Dohrn seek to ground modal intuitions on non-modal ones, and primarily appeal to the modalizing capacity of imagination to aid in the discovery of modal truths. However, insofar as (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • There are no i-beliefs or i-desires at work in fiction consumption and this is why.Peter Langland-Hassan - 2020 - In Explaining Imagination. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 210-233.
    Currie’s (2010) argument that “i-desires” must be posited to explain our responses to fiction is critically discussed. It is argued that beliefs and desires featuring ‘in the fiction’ operators—and not sui generis imaginings (or "i-beliefs" or "i-desires")—are the crucial states involved in generating fiction-directed affect. A defense of the “Operator Claim” is mounted, according to which ‘in the fiction’ operators would be also be required within fiction-directed sui generis imaginings (or "i-beliefs" and "i-desires"), were there such. Once we appreciate that (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   18 citations  
  • Creativity.Peter Langland-Hassan - 2020 - In Explaining Imagination. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 262-296.
    Comparatively easy questions we might ask about creativity are distinguished from the hard question of explaining transformative creativity. Many have focused on the easy questions, offering no reason to think that the imagining relied upon in creative cognition cannot be reduced to more basic folk psychological states. The relevance of associative thought processes to songwriting is then explored as a means for understanding the nature of transformative creativity. Productive artificial neural networks—known as generative antagonistic networks (GANs)—are a recent example of (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   5 citations  
  • Epistemic Projects, Indispensability, and the Structure of Modal Thought.Felipe Morales Carbonell - 2020 - Res Philosophica 97 (4):611-638.
    I argue that modal epistemology should pay more attention to questions about the structure and function of modal thought. We can treat these questions from synchronic and diachronic angles. From a synchronic perspective, I consider whether a general argument for the epistemic support of modal though can be made on the basis of modal thoughs’s indispensability for what Enoch and Schechter (2008) call rationally required epistemic projects. After formulating the argument, I defend it from various objections. I also examine the (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Explaining Imagination.Peter Langland-Hassan - 2020 - Oxford: Oxford University Press.
    ​Imagination will remain a mystery—we will not be able to explain imagination—until we can break it into parts we already understand. Explaining Imagination is a guidebook for doing just that, where the parts are other ordinary mental states like beliefs, desires, judgments, and decisions. In different combinations and contexts, these states constitute cases of imagining. This reductive approach to imagination is at direct odds with the current orthodoxy, according to which imagination is a sui generis mental state or process—one with (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   30 citations  
  • Knowledge of objective modality.Margot Strohminger & Juhani Yli-Vakkuri - 2018 - Philosophical Studies 176 (5):1155-1175.
    The epistemology of modality has focused on metaphysical modality and, more recently, counterfactual conditionals. Knowledge of kinds of modality that are not metaphysical has so far gone largely unexplored. Yet other theoretically interesting kinds of modality, such as nomic, practical, and ‘easy’ possibility, are no less puzzling epistemologically. Could Clinton easily have won the 2016 presidential election—was it an easy possibility? Given that she didn’t in fact win the election, how, if at all, can we know whether she easily could (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   12 citations  
  • Kant on the epistemic role of the imagination.Tobias Rosefeldt - 2019 - Synthese 198 (Suppl 13):3171-3192.
    In recent years, more and more people have become attracted by the idea that the imagination should play a central role in explaining our knowledge of what is possible and necessary and what would be the case if things were different from how they actually are. The biggest challenge for this account is to explain how the imagination can be restricted in such a way that it can play this epistemic role, for there are certainly also unrestricted uses of the (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  • Narrow Content, by Juhani Yli-Vakkuri and John Hawthorne. [REVIEW]Sarah Sawyer - 2019 - Mind 128 (511):976-984.
    This is an extended review of Juhani Yli-Vakkuri & John Hawthorne's book: Narrow Content (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018)..
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • Metaphysical and absolute possibility.Justin Clarke-Doane - 2019 - Synthese 198 (Suppl 8):1861-1872.
    It is widely alleged that metaphysical possibility is “absolute” possibility Conceivability and possibility, Clarendon, Oxford, 2002, p 16; Stalnaker, in: Stalnaker Ways a world might be: metaphysical and anti-metaphysical essays, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2003, pp 201–215; Williamson in Can J Philos 46:453–492, 2016). Kripke calls metaphysical necessity “necessity in the highest degree”. Van Inwagen claims that if P is metaphysically possible, then it is possible “tout court. Possible simpliciter. Possible period…. possib without qualification.” And Stalnaker writes, “we can agree (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   27 citations  
  • (1 other version)Imagination.Shen-yi Liao & Tamar Gendler - 2019 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    To imagine is to form a mental representation that does not aim at things as they actually, presently, and subjectively are. One can use imagination to represent possibilities other than the actual, to represent times other than the present, and to represent perspectives other than one’s own. Unlike perceiving and believing, imagining something does not require one to consider that something to be the case. Unlike desiring or anticipating, imagining something does not require one to wish or expect that something (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   56 citations  
  • The epistemology of modality and the problem of modal epistemic friction.Anand Jayprakash Vaidya & Michael Wallner - 2021 - Synthese 198 (Suppl 8):1909-1935.
    There are three theories in the epistemology of modality that have received sustained attention over the past 20 years: conceivability-theory, counterfactual-theory, and deduction-theory. In this paper we argue that all three face what we call the problem of modal epistemic friction. One consequence of the problem is that for any of the three accounts to yield modal knowledge, the account must provide an epistemology of essence. We discuss an attempt to fend off the problem within the context of the internalism (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   26 citations  
  • New Directions in the Epistemology of Modality: Introduction.Antonella Mallozzi - 2021 - Synthese 198 (Suppl 8):1841-1859.
    The fourteen papers in this collection offer a variety of original contributions to the epistemology of modality. In seeking to explain how we might account for our knowledge of possibility and necessity, they raise some novel questions, develop some unfamiliar theoretical perspectives, and make some intriguing proposals. Collectively, they advance our understanding of the field. In Part I of this Introduction, I give some general background about the contemporary literature in the area, by sketching a timeline of the main tendencies (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  • (1 other version)The Necessity of Mathematics.Juhani Yli‐Vakkuri & John Hawthorne - 2018 - Noûs 52 (3):549-577.
    Some have argued for a division of epistemic labor in which mathematicians supply truths and philosophers supply their necessity. We argue that this is wrong: mathematics is committed to its own necessity. Counterfactuals play a starring role.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   9 citations  
  • On a Priori Knowledge of Necessity.Juhani Yli-Vakkuri & Margot Strohminger - 2018
    The idea that the epistemology of modality is in some sense a priori is a popular one, but it has turned out to be difficult to precisify in a way that does not expose it to decisive counterexamples. The most common precisifications follow Kripke’s suggestion that cases of necessary a posteriori truth that can be known a priori to be necessary if true ‘may give a clue to a general characterization of a posteriori knowledge of necessary truths’. The idea is (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  • Knowledge by Imagination - How Imaginative Experience Can Ground Knowledge.Fabian Dorsch - 2016 - Teorema: International Journal of Philosophy 35 (3):87-116.
    In this article, I defend the view that we can acquire factual knowledge – that is, contingent propositional knowledge about certain (perceivable) aspects of reality – on the basis of imaginative experience. More specifically, I argue that, under suitable circumstances, imaginative experiences can rationally determine the propositional content of knowledge-constituting beliefs – though not their attitude of belief – in roughly the same way as perceptual experiences do in the case of perceptual knowledge. I also highlight some philosophical consequences of (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   17 citations  
  • (1 other version)Imagination.Tamar Szabó Gendler - 2012 - In Ed Zalta (ed.), Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   54 citations  
  • (1 other version)The blurred line between epistemic and metaphysical modalities in the modal epistemology of imagination.Iñaki Xavier Larrauri Pertierra - 2022 - Philosophical Forum 53 (4):227-258.
    Modal epistemologies that rely on a fallibilism about modal claims have been gaining traction over the years. This paper critically discusses the accounts of Kung (2009, 2010, 2016) and Dohrn (2018, 2019, 2020b) and argues that they are invariably susceptible to being read as entailing claims of epistemic possibility. Both Kung and Dohrn seek to ground modal intuitions on non‐modal ones, and primarily appeal to the modalizing capacity of imagination to aid in the discovery of modal truths. However, insofar as (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • The Appearance of Skepticism: Possibility, Conceivability and Infinite Ascent.Sorin Bangu - 2021 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 51 (2):94-107.
    The paper articulates a novel strategy against external world skepticism. It shows that a modal assumption of the skeptical argument cannot be justified.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Meaning and Metaphysical Necessity.Tristan Grotvedt Haze - 2022 - New York: Routledge.
    This book is about the idea that some true statements would have been true no matter how the world had turned out, while others could have been false. It develops and defends a version of the idea that we tell the difference between these two types of truths in part by reflecting on the meanings of words. It has often been thought that modal issues—issues about possibility and necessity—are related to issues about meaning. In this book, the author defends the (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  • Modal Pluralism and Higher‐Order Logic.Justin Clarke-Doane & William McCarthy - 2022 - Philosophical Perspectives 36 (1):31-58.
    In this article, we discuss a simple argument that modal metaphysics is misconceived, and responses to it. Unlike Quine's, this argument begins with the simple observation that there are different candidate interpretations of the predicate ‘could have been the case’. This is analogous to the observation that there are different candidate interpretations of the predicate ‘is a member of’. The argument then infers that the search for metaphysical necessities is misguided in much the way the ‘set-theoretic pluralist’ claims that the (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  • Priority Monism and Junk.Jamie Taylor - 2021 - Analytic Philosophy 63 (1):44-61.
    Analytic Philosophy, Volume 63, Issue 1, Page 44-61, March 2022.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  • (1 other version)The Necessity of Mathematics.Juhani Yli-Vakkuri & John Hawthorne - 2020 - Noûs 54 (3):549-577.
    Some have argued for a division of epistemic labor in which mathematicians supply truths and philosophers supply their necessity. We argue that this is wrong: mathematics is committed to its own necessity. Counterfactuals play a starring role.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   11 citations  
  • Abduction versus conceiving in modal epistemology.Stephen Biggs & Jessica Wilson - 2019 - Synthese 198 (Suppl 8):2045-2076.
    How should modal reasoning proceed? Here we compare abduction-based and conceiving-based modal epistemologies, and argue that an abduction-based approach is preferable, and by a wide margin.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   5 citations  
  • Frontloading and the Necessary A Posteriori.Mikkel Gerken - 2024 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 102 (4):905-924.
    In this paper, I reevaluate Kripke’s arguments for the necessary a posteriori contra a Kantian pure modal rationalism according to which modal cognition is a priori. I argue that Kripke’s critique of Kant suggests an impure but nevertheless ambitious modal rationalism according to which the basis of modal cognition remains a priori. I then argue that Kripke’s critique of pure modal rationalism does not go deep enough. More specifically, I argue that certain conditional modal judgments, which Kripke regards as a (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark