By Tristan Haze
(Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4.)
This is the final instalment in my recondite but edifying series of posts on epistemic modality. I began developing one of the main theoretical upshots of the investigation in a draft paper called 'Assessing Epistemic Modals' which you can find here (for now at least), but lots of things came up which aren't reflected there.
Earlier I wrote that the puzzle about epistemic modals is their subjectivity, whereas with metaphysical modals, it is their objectivity.
But that only gives half the story in each case. With respect to epistemic modals, what I would prefer to say now is: When we assimilate epistemic modals to subjective propositions (e.g. 'I am in such and such a location'), we are puzzled by their objectivity, by their pointing beyond one's "location". When we assimilate epistemic modals to objective propositions on the other hand, we are puzzled by their subjectivity.
The solution, I believe, is to transmute these assimilations into comparisons, and to allow epistemic modals to be themselves. But is that a task which one can attempt? It seems rather that, once one sees that my solution is desirable, one has thereby taken the decisive step. What remains, however, is to give the description which supports and fills out such a treatment.
That is, the sort of description that encourages one to attend omnivorously to the subjective and objective aspects, so to speak, rather than a description which causes one to fixate on one or the other (or on one and then on the other).
This sort of situation, where one has to steer between two views by giving up something common to them and forging a new (purpose-built) view, occurs all throughout philosophy. Examples:
- Identity as a relation between objects vs. identity as a relation between names (cf. this and this).
- Existence as a predicate of objects vs. existence as a predicate of names (it seems modern philosophy has done a little better on this score than on identity).
- Analyticity about modality vs. substantive-truth-ism as espoused by contemporary metaphysicians.
- To paraphrase Anscombe, 'the stupidity of empiricism' vs. the wildness of idealism.
- Cognitivism vs. non-cognitivism in metaethics.
- The view that names have senses given by definite descriptions or clusters thereof vs. the view that names 'have no connotation', nothing to their meaning except their referent.
- The view that conditionals can be given a non-circular truth-conditional analysis vs. the view that conditionals are not truth-apt.
Quasi-realism and related views are interesting in this connection (for example, in the case of cognitivism vs. noncognitivism in metaethics). It is as though they go some way toward the sort of treatment I advocate, but then fail in some more subtle way. Quasi-realism makes it look like, although it is correct in a kind of easygoing sense to speak of truth and the like in quasi-real (what Blackburn calls 'nondescriptive') contexts, it is not strictly correct. But how unclear! For how isn't that just a labelling issue? Blackburn wants to have more restricted concepts of truth and of proposition and of description, it would seem, than ordinary language gives. And he is welcome to them. The funny thing is, I possess (and want to possess) very similar restricted concepts myself, but I feel like Blackburn's quasi-realism is a bad view.
