How (not) to construct worlds with responsibility

In a recent article, P. Roger Turner and Justin Capes argue that no one is, or ever was, even partly morally responsible for certain world-indexed truths. Here we present our reasons for thinking that their argument is unsound: It depends on the premise that possible worlds are maximally consistent states of affairs, which is, under plausible assumptions concerning states of affairs, demonstrably false. Our argument to show this is based on Bertrand Russell’s original ‘paradox of propositions’. We should then opt for a different approach to explain world-indexed truths whose upshot is that we may be (at least partly) morally responsible for some of them. The result to the effect that there are no maximally consistent states of affairs is independently interesting though, since this notion motivates an account of the nature of possible worlds in the metaphysics of modality. We also register in this article, independently of our response to Turner and Capes, and in the spirit of Russell’s aforementioned paradox and many other versions thereof, a proof of the claim that there is no set of all true propositions one can render false.

Metaphysics, Meaning, and Modality

This book is the first edited volume on the philosophy of one of the most seminal and profound contemporary philosophers. The volume is intended for philosophers, linguists, and cognitive scientists interested in metaphysics, language, and philosophical logic. The readers will benefit from the debates over Kit Fine’s novel theories on meaning and representation, arbitrary objects, essence, ontological realism, metaphysics of modality, and constitution of things. The work contains original essays which evaluate both the philosophical and some of the formal seminal contributions of Kit Fine to contemporary metaphysics, ontology, philosophy of language, and philosophical logic. The chapters in the work also advance new ideas and arguments which help in developing the debates on concepts of interests not only for philosophers but also for linguists and cognitive scientists who are interested in the foundations of their own fields. The work gives Kit Fine’s current views on the topics that he has helped to renew in today’s metaphysics, philosophy of language, and philosophical logic. The work contributes to the furthering of the debates in metaphysics, philosophical logic, and philosophy of language, focusing on brand new theories in the forefront of analytic philosophy. More generally, the hope is that a thorough discussion of the work of a very innovative and profound author such as Kit Fine can contribute to a better understanding of what is at stake within contemporary analytic philosophy.

Introduction: Explaining Contingency

The first part of this introduction sketches the main project of the book, and the structure of the arguments for my proposed quantum modal realism. The second part describes the unsatisfying present state of the metaphysics of modality, setting out what I take to be the most serious objections facing the best extant proposals. A naturalistic approach to metaphysics promises to resolve these objections by providing an account of modality that draws only on scientifically respectable theoretical resources. In the third part, I distinguish two big-picture approaches to the metaphysics of modality, and argue for the viability of an unfamiliar approach that takes the nature of contingency as the core phenomenon that a theory of modality needs to explain. In the fourth part, I explain my methodology and briefly defend the general project of naturalistic metaphysics.

Emergent Chance

This chapter offers a theory of objective chance in the Everettian context, often seen as the main challenge facing EQM. By supplementing diverging EQM with quantum modal realist bridge principles connecting the physics of quantum mechanics with the metaphysics of modality, we obtain a package deal: Indexicalism. Indexicalist objective chance is an essentially self-locating phenomenon: chances are chances of self-location within the multiverse. I provide three arguments for Indexicalism: it establishes the right qualitative connections between chance and possibility, it establishes the right quantitative connection between chance and prediction, and it establishes the right epistemological story about how quantum mechanics is confirmed by empirical evidence. The resulting theory of chance is naturalistic and reductive; fundamental reality is deterministic, but chance arises at the non-fundamental level of Everett-worldbound perspectives. The theory provides unique resources for motivating an Everettian version of Lewis’s Principal Principle, helping to clarify at last the persistently mysterious connection between chance and rational credence.

Introduction

Although interest in Kant’s views on modality has surged only recently, Kant had a great deal to say about modal notions throughout his long philosophic career, from his early works of the 1750s and 60s to his critical works. While there may also be various reasons to be interested in Kant’s recurrent discussions of modality from the viewpoint of contemporary epistemology and metaphysics of modality, as Jessica Leech and, to some extent, Nick Stang demonstrate in their works, they deserve particularly special attention from both broader historical and Kant scholarship points of view. For not only do these discussions constitute a genuine turning point in the history of modal thought, but they also provide a framework for a novel interpretation of Kant’s philosophical trajectory....

Spinoza’s Metaphysics of Modality

Chapter four argues that ignoring a fundamental explanatory question has led interpreters to misunderstand Spinoza’s views on necessity, contingency, possibility, and impossibility. Although the scope of Spinoza’s necessitarianism has also been hotly debated, a central question has gone largely unasked: just what is modality, according to Spinoza? By focusing first on his analysis of necessity, we gain insight into more familiar questions of modal distribution: what exists necessarily, contingently, and so forth. Spinoza ultimately endorses a form of what might now be called anti-essentialism, according to which the modal status of some things depends partly on how those things are conceived. Hence Spinoza affirms both the genuine contingency and strict necessity of one and the same thing’s existence, depending on how it is conceived. After considering Spinoza’s defense of this account, the author turns to why Spinoza thinks we do not, in fact, adopt necessitarian perspectives on the world.

Necessary Facts

This chapter is a discussion of the metaphysics of modality. The topic is approached through the lens of actualism and trope ontology, two doctrines that have been articulated and defended in previous chapters. The view to be expounded is that necessary facts are objective and not subjective or merely verbal. In addition, necessity is a feature of mereological and resemblance relations among actual ‘qualitied contents’. Since mereological and resemblance relations are intrinsic, our understanding of modality is cashed out in terms of intrinsicality. This is combined with a combinatorial account of possibility: what is possible is grounded in combinations of actual existents.