A Humean modal epistemology
- PDF / 347,720 Bytes
- 25 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 86 Downloads / 250 Views
A Humean modal epistemology Daniel Dohrn1 Received: 15 November 2019 / Accepted: 19 August 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract I present an exemplary Humean modal epistemology. My version takes inspiration from but incurs no commitment to both Hume’s historical position and Lewis’s Humeanism. Modal epistemology should meet two challenges: the Integration challenge of integrating metaphysics and epistemology and the Reliability challenge of giving an account of how our epistemic capacities can be reliable in detecting modal truth. According to Lewis, modal reasoning starts from certain Humean principles: there is only the vast mosaic of spatiotemporally distributed local matters of fact. The facts can be arbitarily recombined. These principles cannot be taken for granted. I suggest a bottom-up approach instead: Humean principles of recombining the mosaic of facts can be retrieved from the evolutionarily instilled and empirically informed use of imagination in exploring everyday circumstantial possibilities. This use of imagination conforms to a primitive conception of matter as freely recombinable. The modal beliefs that can be obtained from generalizing the more elementary exercise of imagination have to be corrected. Recombination is limited by sortal criteria of identity. Moreover, the overall picture of a recombinable spatiotemporal mosaic must be weighed against the results of science. Keywords Hume · Humeanism · Humean supervenience · David Lewis · Imagination · Modal epistemology · Modal · Possibility · Impossibility · Necessity · Plenitude · Recombination · Conceivability · Naturalism · Modal realism I shall outline an exemplary version of modal epistemology that is Humean in spirit. Modal epistemology, the study of how we know possibility and necessity, has been largely shaped by the Humean tradition of using imagination as a guide to modal knowledge. However, the potential of a broadly Humean approach has not yet been exhausted.
B 1
Daniel Dohrn [email protected] Dipartimento di Filosofia, Università degli Studi di Milano, Via Festa del Perdono 7, 20122 Milan, Italy
123
Synthese
My Humean proposal aims at addressing two major challenges to modal epistemology (cf. Thomasson 2018): (i) The Integration Challenge. (ii) The Reliability Challenge. (i) The Integration Challenge concerns the integration of metaphysics and epistemology. Any metaphysical theory must at least in principle be compatible with an epistemology telling how we know the theory (cf. Peacocke 1999, p. 1). Ditto for modal metaphysics and modal epistemology. (ii) The Reliability Challenge is to explain why our capacities of acquiring knowledge in a certain field are reliable. Joshua Schechter divides the challenge into two questions1 : ‘The Operational Question: How does our cognitive mechanism for [modal judgements] work such that it is reliable? The Etiological Question: How is it that we have a cognitive mechanism for [modal judgements] that is reliable?’(Schechter 2010, p. 444) A naturalistic version of the Etiological Question fo
Data Loading...
