Howard Liu
University of Miami
In their works, Bueno and Shalkowski critically assess previously dominant modal epistemologies and develop their own account under the metaphysical setting of modalism. They distinguish two camps of dominant accounts–rationalism and non-rationalism–and criticize them respectively. On one hand, they argue against rationalism, particularly intuition-based rationalism, with case studies in history where intuition failed to guide us to the truth and the absence of independent reason to verify intuition’s reliability. On the other hand, they target non-rationalism based on abduction and similarity reasoning. Against the abductive-based account, they contend the use of theoretical virtues requires additional assumptions about what reality is like. But these assumptions remain unsupported. They suggest that contingent cosmic regularity might compromise similarity reasoning as a means to knowledge about possibilities. Alternatively, they advocate a local and hybrid form of modal epistemology. They accept modalism that suggests modal properties are primitive. They then develop epistemology that parallels the metaphysical view. They identify two main sources of modal knowledge. First, we can infer modal knowledge from reflection on the relationship between strong and weak claims. Second, modal knowledge can be extracted as well from our knowledge of the actual world like learning a table’s breakability from knowledge of a table’s composition. In this paper, I argue that Bueno and Shalkowski’s critique is in tension with their own theory. First, I argue that the criteria that they use to criticize previous modal epistemologies will compromise means that their account needs to obtain modal knowledge such as perception as well. Second, I point out that intuition is still implicitly required to acquire epistemic principles needed for their account. But if this is so, then their account is further undermined by their own criticism of other accounts. I argue that this put Bueno and Shalkowski into a dilemma. Either they maintain their criteria and critique of previous accounts but a far more radical form of modal skepticism follows, or they can loosen up their criteria but previous accounts remain unscathed. I suggest the second option is more palatable and discuss potential consequences of the choice.
Chair: Sebastián Sánchez Martínez
Time: September 6th, 14:00-14:30
Location: SR 1.004
SOPhiA 2026 