An integrative design? How liberalised modal empiricism fails the integration challenge

Abstract

The idea that justified modal belief can be accounted for in terms of empirically justified, non-modal belief is enjoying increasing popularity in the epistemology of modality. One alleged reason to prefer modal empiricism over more traditional, rationalist modal epistemologies is that empiricism avoids the problem with the integration challenge that arise for rationalism, assuming that we want to be realists about modal metaphysics. In this paper, I argue that given two very reasonable constraints on what it means to meet the integration challenge for modality, empiricism is currently at best on a par with, but potentially worse off than, rationalist alternatives, with respect to the integration challenge.

Relational Troubles Structuralist Worries for an Epistemology of Powers-Based Modality

“…Finally, the package, dispositionalism and perception, provides a step towards a satisfactory solution to the Integration Challenge (Peacocke, 1999;Sjolin Wirling, 2021;Roca-Royes, 2021). The Integration Challenge is the challenge to 'reconcile a plausible account of what is involved in the truth of statements of a given kind with a credible account of how we can know those statements, when we do know them' (Peacocke, 1999, 1).…”

Possibility, relevant similarity, and structural knowledge

“…So, for the purposes of this paper, I will use ‘knows,’ ‘justifiably believes,’ etc. interchangeably (see also Fischer, 2017 , p. 6; Sjölin Wirling, 2021 , p. 5655, fn. 1).…”