Modal Primitivism
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Modal Primitivism
Modal primitivism is the view that there are modal features of the world which cannot be reduced to the non-modal. Theories which embrace primitive modality are often rejected for reasons of ideological simplicity: the fewer primitive notions a theory invokes, the better. Furthermore, modal primitivism is often associated with the view that all modal features of the world are irreducibly modal, which appears unsystematic and unexplanatory. As a result, many prefer modal reductionism. This work is an articulation and defense of a modal primitivist theory of modality which requires minimal ideology and is systematic and explanatory. On this version of modal primitivism, only some modal features of the world are irreducibly modal--namely, incompatibilities between certain properties or relations. Other modal features of the world are reducible to a combination of primitive incompatibilities and the non-modal features of the world. In chapter 1, I introduce various issues in the metaphysics of modality, giving appropriate background for what follows. My modal primitivist theory of modality is introduced in chapters 2 and 3. In chapter 2, I argue that a well-known modal reductionist theory of modality is not as ideologically innocent as it's thought to be: modal primitivism has the upper hand with respect to primitive notions. I then introduce the primitive notion of incompatibility and show how this notion can be used to account for de dicto modality, which concerns purely qualitative modal claims. In chapter 3, I present a theory of de re modality, that which concerns modal claims involving particular individuals. Since on this theory the de re is reducible to the de dicto, it requires no more primitive modality than that which appears at the level of the de dicto. I end in chapter 4 by arguing against a rival modal primitivist theory, showing that the primitive notion that it countenances, dispositionality, cannot account for all modal claims.
Modality and Anti-Metaphysics
This title was first published in 2001. Modality and Anti-Metaphysics critically examines the most prominent approaches to modality among analytic philosophers in the twentieth century, including essentialism. Defending both the project of metaphysics and the essentialist position that metaphysical modality is conceptually and ontologically primitive, Stephen McLeod argues that the logical positivists did not succeed in banishing metaphysical modality from their own theoretical apparatus and he offers an original defence of metaphysics against their advocacy of its elimination. Seeking to assuage the sceptical worries which underlie modal anti-realism, McLeod provides an original contribution to essentialist epistemology, engaging with current debates about modality and suggesting that standard essentialist approaches to some issues in the philosophies of logic and language require revision. This book offers valuable insights to professional philosophers, postgraduates and advanced undergraduates interested in metaphysics, philosophy of logic or the history of twentieth-century analytic philosophy.
The Sources of Necessity
Author: Tobias Wilsch
language: en
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Release Date: 2025-03-23
It is a currently popular view that essences, laws, and logic are among the grounds of necessity and possibility. Another such idea relates essences, laws, and logic closely to causal explanations and to non-causal grounding explanations. The Sources of Necessity combines those tenets within the view that certain phenomena establish explanations because they exert necessity, a modal force, on the facts. In form of a slogan, the explanatory phenomena are the sources of necessity. The book investigates this idea, and it argues that essences, laws, and logic are the sources of necessity. The investigation contains two different strands, one pertaining to explanation and one to necessity. In the first strand, The Sources of Necessity uses different ways of exerting necessity to analyse the explanatory behaviour of essences, laws, and logic. It investigates the governance of natural laws, the interplay of essences and logic in the generation of absolute necessity, and the existence and nature of metaphysical laws. The second strand concerns the nature of necessity. It is argued that necessity is primitive and that there are several equally fundamental species of necessity. Two particularly thorny questions about necessity that arise from these insights are, 'Why are the sources of necessity themselves necessary?', and 'Why are different kinds of necessity ordered by strength?' The book develops a rationalist view to answer those questions. It says that contingent reality is the result of a cosmogenic sequence that unfolds from essences and logic through the other sources all the way to the contingent facts.