Comments on Vogel

Abstract

Subjunctivitis is a condition afflicting epistemologists, a tendency to employ subjunctive conditionals in their accounts of knowledge. Jonathan Vogel identifies two common strains of subjunctivitis one featuring the subjunctive conditional, sensitivity, and the other, safety and he offers families of counterexamples to each. His cases are ingeniously crafted and highly intuitive. They demonstrate that modalizing in epistemology is not a painless ordeal. But my goal here is damage control; subjunctivitis, I think, may prove to be worth its side effects. I will argue that, for reasons both thematic and specific, the counterexamples are not so compelling as to force the abandonment of modal epistemology. First, while the intuitive force of Vogel's examples is especially acute, much of that force derives not specifically from modal nature of the analyses, but from the familiar and perfectly general paradoxes of skepticism and of the lottery. Thus, one should draw broader lessons from the counterexamples only if an independent and more satisfying solution to the paradoxes is available. Second, under scrutiny the cases reveal certain ambiguities, the resolution of which opens up space for subjunctive conditional accounts to form responses. Third, the extension of Vogel's case against sensitivity to contextualist theories relies partly upon a confusion of use and mention. In what follows, I will briefly review the notions of sensitivity and safety as well as their applications to some epistemic problems, then present Vogel's counterexamples with my rejoinders.