Anti-Realism and Modal-Epistemic Collapse: Reply to Marton

Abstract

Marton (2019) argues that that it follows from the standard antirealist theory of truth, which states that truth and possible knowledge are equivalent, that knowing possibilities is equivalent to the possibility of knowing, whereas these notions should be distinct. Moreover, he argues that the usual strategies of dealing with the Church–Fitch paradox of knowability are either not able to deal with his modal-epistemic collapse result or they only do so at a high price. Against this, I argue that Marton’s paper does not present any seriously novel challenge to anti-realism not already found in the Church–Fitch result. Furthermore, Edgington (1985) reformulated antirealist theory of truth can deal with his modal-epistemic collapse argument at no cost.