Counterfactuals and Non-exceptionalism About Modal Knowledge
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Counterfactuals and Non‑exceptionalism About Modal Knowledge Daniel Dohrn1 Received: 5 November 2016 / Accepted: 19 November 2018 © Springer Nature B.V. 2018
Abstract Since our capacities and methods of cognizing reality merely seem to tell us how things are but only within close limits how they could or must be, our claims to knowledge of mere possibilities and necessities raise the suspicion of exceptionalism: the capacities and methods used in developing these claims seem special compared to those involved in cognizing reality. One may be sceptical especially with regard to them, and there are doubts that they can be naturalistically explained. To avoid exceptionalism, Timothy Williamson has proposed to reduce the epistemology of modality to the epistemology of everyday counterfactuals. There are doubts that the proposal succeeds. One objection is that the counterfactual-based epistemology fails to account for metaphysical necessities like the necessity of origin. For the account to cover such necessities, constitutive facts like the origin of a living being would have to form implicit constraints built into the capacity for everyday counterfactual reasoning. But is counterfactual reasoning indeed so constrained? I answer this question in the affirmative, presenting an epistemology of counterfactuals for modal epistemology to build on. The constraints gradually emerge by a broadly abductive process, starting from within everyday counterfactual reasoning. The process does not presuppose any independent knowledge of the constitutive status of certain facts. Philosophers are often interested in questions how things could, and how they must be. In particular, they are interested in metaphysical modalities: could gold have an atom number different from 79? Could Aristotle have originated from a different sperm and egg than he actually did originate from? However, it is difficult to tell how we can know the answers to such questions. Since our experience of reality seems only to tell us how things are and at best within very close limits how they could or must be, there is a suspicion that philosophy must be special, exempt from empirical science. * Daniel Dohrn [email protected] 1
Philosophie, HU Berlin, Unter den Linden 6, 10099 Berlin, Germany
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This suspicion of philosophical exceptionalism gives rise to two concerns. (a) One may be sceptical specifically about modal knowledge (cf. van Inwagen 1998)1: our epistemic capacities are attuned to reality, but nothing ensures that they are attuned to the modal questions asked by philosophers. (b) There is a concern that our capacities for modal reasoning cannot be naturalistically explained, e.g. by adaptive processes.2 As a consequence, they seem spooky. We may wonder what their place in nature could be. Moved by such worries, recently many philosophers have explicitly or implicitly pursued a non-exceptionalist program (e.g. Williamson 2007; Kroedel 2012; Fischer 2016; the authors in Fischer and Leon 2017). The aim is to show
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