Modal Epistemology After Rationalism

This collection highlights the new trend toward empiricism in modal epistemology. The book represents much of the range of positions on the sources of modal knowledge, featuring essays that explore candidate empirical sources. Contributing authors explore the recent trend away from modal rationalism and toward modal empiricism, and the epistemology of modality. Readers will find an introduction that surveys the field and provides a brief overview of the work. Early chapters focus on the prospects of essence-based approaches to modal knowledge, before challenges for rationalist theories are raised. The book’s structure progresses from empirically-sensitive rationalist accounts to fully empiricist accounts of modal knowledge and justification. Positive accounts are presented, of candidate sources of modal knowledge 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, showing that the basic element in all such accounts is an inference from the actual to the possible. Standard inferential routes are explored, including deductive, inductive and abductive. Modal epistemology is coming into its own as a field and this book has the potential to anchor a new research agenda.

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).