Argument

Workshop

“Concepts and Modal Epistemology”

CESC, ENS de Lyon

May 13 and 14 2013

This workshop is part of a general research project dealing with the foundations of contemporary theories of concepts, both philosophical and cognitive-scientific. The specific aim of the workshop is to investigate the connections between such theories and recent attempts to account for modal knowledge.

Assuming we have at least some knowledge about what could have been and what could not have been otherwise, an important question is how such modal knowledge is possible. Some story needs to be told as to where this knowledge comes from, how it is acquired and justified. Such are the main tasks of Modal Epistemology.

Concepts have traditionally been thought to be able to play at least some role in such an endeavor. Conceivability is traditionally held among rationalist (e.g. Descartes) and empiricist (e.g. Hume) philosophers alike to be at least a reliable indicator of possibility. According to another tradition (e.g. Kant), analytic truths are both necessary and a priori, so that one can gain knowledge of necessities on the basis of the knowledge of conceptual connexions between meanings.

Those traditional approaches, however, have been seriously affected by the work of Putnam and Kripke on reference and necessity in the 1970s. Some consensus then emerged in the philosophical community that conceivable scenarios (Hesperus being distinct from Phosphorus, water not being H₂O, etc.) could nevertheless be “metaphysically” impossible. Related considerations showed that necessity and apriority do not always coincide: there are cases of contingent a priori truths (“I am here”, “the standard meter is one meter long”) as well as a posteriori necessities (“Bod Dylan is Robert Zimmerman”, “Gold is the element with atomic number 79”, etc.).

Now, the moral of this story is not easy to draw. Two sorts of attitudes can be adopted. One way to go is to say that the traditional approaches were deeply flawed. Modal epistemology needs to start afresh. Recent counterfactual-based epistemologies of modality (Hill, Williamson) could be seen as a kind of new approach, quite independent of the traditional answers to the problem. In this case, it is not clear that concepts are to play a decisive role. The other attitude, on the contrary, is to keep with the spirit, if not the letter, of the tradition and try to accommodate the problematic Putnam/Kripke cases within a more sophisticated theory. One could regard David Chalmers' Epistemic Two-Dimensional Semantics, or George Bealer's “modal reliabilist” approach, as two different ways to accomplish this kind of program. In the case of Bealer, interestingly, concepts do play a decisive role in the explanation of the reliability of our modal intuitions.

Still, many important questions remain about the role of concepts in modal epistemology, if they can play a role at all. Even if one adopts the latter attitude, it is not totally clear what role exactly concepts should play, and if they can play a decisive role.

Concerning the first point, Moderate Rationalists such Bealer and Chrisopher Peacocke assign an important role to concepts in their respective accounts of modal knowledge. On Peacocke's account, especially, the possession-conditions of the modal concepts POSSIBLE and NECESSARY play a crucial role in the response to the Integration Challenge. However, it is not entirely clear that those quite demanding possession-conditions closely correspond to the possession-conditions of our ordinary modal concepts.

It is not clear either that concepts alone can account for the totality of our modal knowledge. For example, it is now widely held that constitutional facts (facts about micro-physical structure, origin, kind-membership, etc.) are at least one important source of necessary truths. Is our conceptual knowledge sufficient to identify the necessary properties objects have in virtue of these constitutive facts? This suggest an important limitation of concept-based approaches to modal epistemology. Is this sort of limitation insuperable ? Do the concept-based accounts of modal knowledge have the resources to explain our knowledge of the modal truths deriving from constitutive facts?