The Problem of Modally Bad Company

Abstract

A particular family of imagination-based epistemologies of possibility promise to provide an account that overcomes problems raised by Kripkean a posteriori impossibilities. That is, they maintain that imagination plays a significant role in the epistemology of possibility. They claim that imagination consists of both linguistic and qualitative content, where the linguistic content is independently verified not to give rise to any impossibilities in the epistemically significant uses of imagination. However, I will argue that these accounts fail to provide a satisfactory basis for an epistemology of possibility as they fall victim to, what I call, the problem of modally bad company. In particular, I will argue that there is a deep methodological problem that these accounts face: in order to deliver the significant epistemology of possibility that they promise, they have to rely on problematic prior knowledge of necessities.

A Note on the Epistemological Value of Pretense Imagination

“…The moral of this story is that if we want to use conditionals to gain knowledge of possibilities, we need prior modal knowledge . The reliance on unexplained prior modal knowledge severely undercuts the prospects of the proposed epistemology of modality (Hale 2003; Hill 2006; Roca-Royes 2017; Schoonen 2020). In this case because the epistemology of possibility crucially leaves us without a story on how we gain knowledge of the possibility of the relevant antecedent.…”