Overview

This collection highlights the new trend away from rationalism and toward empiricism in the epistemology of modality. Accordingly, the book represents a wide range of positions on the empirical sources of modal knowledge. Readers will find an introduction that surveys the field and provides a brief overview of the work, which progresses from empirically-sensitive rationalist accounts to fully empiricist accounts of modal knowledge. Early chapters focus on challenges to rationalist theories, essence-based approaches to modal knowledge, and the prospects for naturalizing modal epistemology. The middle chapters present positive accounts that reject rationalism, but which stop short of advocating exclusive appeal to empirical sources of modal knowledge. The final chapters mark a transition toward exclusive reliance on empirical sources of modal knowledge. They explore ways of making similarity-based, analogical, inductive, and abductive arguments for modal claims based on empirical information. Modal epistemology is coming into its own as a field, and this book has the potential to anchor a new research agenda.

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9783319830360

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Author Information

Bob Fischer is an assistant professor of philosophy at Texas State University. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Chicago and works on problems in modal epistemology and applied ethics. He is co-editor of The Moral Complexities of Eating Meat (Oxford University Press, 2015), editor of College Ethics (Oxford University Press, 2016), and author of Modal Justification via Theories (Springer, forthcoming).  Felipe Leon is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at El Camino College. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of California, Riverside. He works primarily on issues in metaphysics, epistemology, and philosophy of religion. His current research focuses on the nature and scope of modal knowledge and its implications for philosophy of religion. His publications include “Why Frankfurt-Examples Don’t Need to Succeed to Succeed” (with Neal Tognazzini. Philosophy & Phenomenological Research 80:3, 20, “Moreland on the Impossibility of Traversing the Infinite: A Critique” (Philo 14:1, 2012), 10), and The Modal-Knowno Problem” (with Robert William Fischer. Southwest Philosophy Review, forthcoming).

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