ABSTRACT In the German context, where legal skepticism toward polygraph-testing intersects with emerging concerns about AI-based deception detection, neuroscientists position their work through methodological restraint and epistemic distancing. Their critical stance toward both visual determinism and applied polygraph-tests serves not only to manage uncertainty, but to claim scientific authority in a contested field. By tracing how visual framing enables both conceptual clarity and epistemic credibility, the analysis contributes to STS debates on the role of visuality in scientific knowledge production. It calls for closer attention to how images, practices, and imaginaries mutually shape what counts as evidence and epistemic possibility in neuroscience.

Abstract The twelfth volume of Oxford Studies in Metaphysics begins with a debate between Amie Thomasson and Ross Cameron on the nature of metaphysics. In short, Thomasson defends her “easy ontology” position that there are no substantive metaphysical questions and argues against Cameron's position, according to which truthmaker questions are not easy. Cameron responds by criticizing Thomasson's easy ontology and defending truthmaker metaphysics. This paper defends Thomasson. Specifically, it argues that Cameron (1) distorts epistemic two‐dimensionalism's notion of epistemic possibility, (2) falls prey to the Picture Theory of language he claims (rightly) to reject, and (3) begs the question against Thomasson by assuming that her modal normativism is false. The defense is valuable more widely because it clarifies the relations between easy ontology, modal normativism, truthmaker metaphysics, and two‐dimensional semantics.

ABSTRACT Soames attributes to Kripke the theory of epistemic possibility that uses metaphysical impossibilities in explaining necessary a posteriori truths. I attribute to Kripke a theory from epistemic counterparthood. I develop an epistemic accessibility based on Kripke’s appeal to Lewis’ counterpart theory that is reflexive, non-transitive, and non-symmetric. I also propose an epistemic counterpart function and a description function.

Abstract Normative realism is the view that there are ought facts, i.e., facts about what we ought to do. A recent influential challenge to normative realism, raised separately by Justin Clarke-Doane and Matti Eklund, argues that ought facts—even if they exist—are inert in the sense that they cannot tell us what to do. The ground for this challenge is the epistemic possibility of a normative pluriverse, that is, the epistemic possibility of there being not only ought facts but also ought-like facts. I counter this challenge by showing the inconsistency, and thus the epistemic impossibility, of a normative pluriverse. I do so mainly by revealing a certain constraint on ought-likeness.

Abstract This article constitutes a pioneering comparative study of the use of epistemic possibility adverbs (EPAs) – i.e., sentence or clausal adverbs expressing neutral epistemic support (reminiscent of English ‘perhaps’) – in the Bantu languages of East Africa. In a sample of a total of 77 languages, the semantic and syntactic inter- and intra-clausal distribution of EPAs and the way they interact with other modal markers is investigated. Next, the semasiological background of the East African Bantu EPAs and the range of additional functions they may serve to co-express is explored. Based on the semantic characteristics of the EPAs, their etymons and the linguistic categories they additionally convey, it is proposed that the common conceptualization underlying these patterns of polysemy is the notion of scalarity, and more precisely that of an in-between position between a positive and a negative pole, thus conveying a neutral, indeterminate or interchangeable stance. Through these endeavors, this study offers the first thorough, comparative-based investigation of the development and distribution of epistemic adverbs in Bantu languages, broadening our understanding of expressions of modality and the use of adverbs more generally, both within Bantu languages and beyond.

Abstract In The Radical Aesthetic (2000), Isobel Armstrong provides an incisive critique of Terry Eagleton's condemnation of the “Kantian Imaginary” in The Ideology of the Aesthetic (1990). Her objections are twofold. First, Eagleton presents this structure as one in which the subject is immobilized by an all-consuming and pleasurable maternalism that inhibits collective action for radical change. Secondly, Eagleton extends his objections to the Kantian Imaginary to suggest that the aesthetic, upon which the consoling pleasures of the beautiful and the sublime are built, is by definition ideological. As a counter to Eagleton's argument, Armstrong turns to the resources of several psychoanalysts, including L. S. Vygotsky, Melanie Klein, D. W. Winnicott, and André Green, to explore the crucial nature of play in the formation of the drives. Together, these writers examine the creation of affective and transformational types of knowledge that seek expression through representation. Armstrong proceeds to show how a range of poems, including works by William Blake and Gerard Manley Hopkins, give aesthetic form to the pursuit of pleasure and beauty in the name of epistemic possibility.

Proponents of non-doxasticism often stress the similarity between non-doxastic and doxastic faith. I argue that there are crucial differences which are easily overlooked. These differences become apparent once we pay attention to the inner side of the religious life a non-doxastic faith enables. The non-doxasticist must make extensive use of imagination and pretence to be able to include some common aspects of a religious life, such as holiness and the love of God, into her religiosity. Thereby, non-doxasticism is closer to fictionalism than is commonly acknowledged. Even more importantly, I argue that to live a satisfying and rationally consistent religious life, the non-doxasticist must supplement her faith with local fictionalism concerning her own inner states. Non-doxastic attitudes require epistemic possibility, but it is not an epistemic possibility for the non-doxasticist that she believes propositions like “I love God.” The only way she can include such proposition into her religious life is to be a fictionalist about them.

This article examines Thomas Aquinas’s critique of Anselm of Canterbury’s ontological argument, focusing particularly on its modal aspects. While Aquinas’s traditional objections (the fallacy of begging the question and the non-self-evidence of God’s definition) have been thoroughly studied, their modal interpretation requires further analysis. The article demonstrates that Aquinas rejects Anselm’s argument because it conflates the ontological necessity of God’s existence with the epistemic possibility of denying it due to human cognitive limitations. Five key texts from Aquinas are analyzed, in which he systematically refutes Anselm, arguing that God’s existence is selfevident only in itself (secundum se) but not to human reason. In the modal version of this critique, emphasis is placed on the denial of transitivity in the relation between possible worlds: the impossibility of comprehending the divine essence in the earthly state prevents the transition to the necessity of knowing God’s existence. Aquinas insists on an epistemic barrier that renders the ontological argument untenable for human cognition. The conclusion notes that while Aquinas’s critique aligns with broader Christian skepticism regarding human knowledge of divine reality in earthly existence, it does not refute the very possibility of God’s necessary existence.

Abstract In this paper, I trace the impact of insubordination and semi-insubordination on the history of Greek, focusing on its impact on the modal system used to express speech acts. Starting from the cross-linguistic connections of insubordinate and semi-insubordinate ἵνα and να constructions with those found in other languages, I show that ἵνα only had subordinate usages in Classical Greek (including in dyadic syntactic contexts), but developed insubordinate usages for directive and wish speech acts in Post-Classical Greek. In Medieval Greek, insubordinate να spreads pragmatically to other speech acts, e.g. to exclamatives, interrogatives and various assertives (e.g. counterfactual apodoses or double negative declaratives). In Modern Greek, insubordinate να has obtained novel usages in interrogative speech acts too and gained paradigmatic strength as it competes with the imperative and the future. Semi-insubordinate patterns are first developed in Medieval Greek (with ἴσως νὰ + main verb) but spread formally and functionally to other parts of the modal system, expressing epistemic possibility, probability, counterfactuality and avertives.

Abstract A new argument is offered which proceeds through epistemic possibility (for all S knows, p), cutting a trail from modality to Millianism, the controversial thesis that the semantic content of a proper name is simply its bearer. New definitions are provided for various epistemic modal notions. A surprising theorem about epistemic necessity is proved. A proposition p can be epistemically necessary for a knowing subject S even though p is a posteriori and S does not know p. The identity relation is well‐behaved in metaphysically possible worlds but can go rogue in epistemically possible worlds. Whereas it can be epistemically possible that Lewis Carroll is not Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, this is not epistemically possible in the manner that anti‐Millianism requires.

The paper investigates the thought of “annihilation,” its theoretical underpinnings, and the praxical overtures it posits. It investigates the how and what of annihilation: what of annihilation as a term, and what Ambedkar wanted the text Annihilation of Caste (AoC) to be. With this frame, the paper re-reads AoC to read the thin line of “conversion” that becomes the only decision, that is, to convert inevitably, by the end of the speech. The paper argues that the term “annihilation” is of Jat-Pat-Todak Mandal and not of Ambedkar’s (as is overwhelmingly assumed, even in the scholarship), although the term remains precisely important to Ambedkar in his theological Buddhistic aspirations. The paper also reads AoC as a “text of conversion” and not as a “text of annihilation.” The paper then initiates an epistemic possibility in framing Ambedkar’s caste-destruction project anew, wherein conversion and spirituality dominate the praxical scenario as against annihilation.

This research examines the exploitation of epistemic modality markers in political discourse. This research inspects modal auxiliaries and semi-modals use in four speeches addressed by Obama at the annual United Nations General Assembly during his second period as a President of America. Applying both qualitative and quantitative methods, this research is in an attempt to accomplish the whole investigation dealing with explorative and quantification of epistemic modality in Obama’s political discourse. The data were taken from Obama’s speeches from 2013 to 2016 at the United Nations General Assembly. The findings demonstrate that 471 modality markers were found in Obama’s speeches and he frequently delivered epistemic probability with 189 cases or 40.2% modal auxiliaries and semi-modals. Epistemic certainty and possibility were found in 125 cases or 26.6% and in 157 cases or 33.2%. The highest degree of epistemic modality, epistemic certainty, is expressed by employing must, have to, need to, cannot, could not, and may not. Modal should, will, would, be going to, and ought to express epistemic probability and modal can, could, may, might, and be able to are exploited to express the lowest degree of epistemic modality, epistemic possibility. The higher epistemic modality markers involved in a proposition indicate the higher confidence of evaluation and judgment asserted based on the speaker’s knowledge, belief, and evidence. In contrast, the lower epistemic modality markers found indicate lower confidence in the evaluation and judgment of the proposition.

ABSTRACT Islamic theological contradictions are metaphysical contradictions as opposed to logical and semantic ones. I shall demonstrate that if these theological contradictions are tolerable on the theoretical account of metaphysical dialetheism, then logical space, despite being the space of all possibilities, does not accommodate them in virtue of Chalmers’s ‘deep epistemic possibility’. To resolve this issue, I offer a recalibration of the modal concept of possibility. Doing so would redraw a demarcation between what is possible and what is not. Consequently, we can expand logical space, so it is properly inclusive of all possibilities, including metaphysical dialetheism. Expanding logical space in this way would repudiate Chalmers’s ‘deep epistemic possibility’ and make room for Islamic theological contradictions.

Drawing on the puzzling behavior of ordinary knowledge ascriptions that embed an epistemic (im)possibility claim, we tentatively conclude that it is untenable to jointly endorse (i) an unfettered classical logic for epistemic language, (ii) the general veridicality of knowledge ascription, and (iii) an intuitive ‘negative transparency’ thesis that reduces knowledge of a simple negated ‘might’ claim to an epistemic claim without modal content. We motivate a strategic trade-off: preserve veridicality and (generalized) negative transparency, while abandoning the general validity of contraposition. We criticize various approaches to incorporating veridicality into domain semantics, a paradigmatic ‘information-sensitive’ framework for capturing negative transparency and, more generally, the non-classical behavior of sentences with epistemic modals. We then present a novel information-sensitive semantics that successfully executes our favored strategy: stable acceptance semantics, extending a vanilla bilateral state-based semantics for epistemic modals with a knowledge operator loosely inspired by the defeasibility theory of knowledge.

Abstract Modifying and hedging one’s claims appropriately is an important characteristic of academic writing. This study focuses on the three main English modal verbs used to express “epistemic possibility” to avoid making strong statements, viz., may, might, and could. The purpose of this corpus-based study is to explore modal verb usage by Japanese EFL undergraduate students and consider pedagogical implications of our findings. Our analysis suggests that the Japanese students’ use of these modal verbs, especially could, has a tendency to be informal and insufficiently academic. While the Japanese students use could very frequently, they do not use it sufficiently in the sense of “epistemic possibility”, and some of their use is inappropriate not just in academic English but in English more generally. The observed high frequency of could may be related to topics and may also be due to the influence of L1. We discuss different factors that may explain the findings, based mainly on the overview of factors impacting on EFL learners’ use of academic English offered by Gilquin and Paquot (2008). Too chatty: Learner academic writing and register variation. English Text Construction 1(1). 41–61), suggest several additions to this overview, and discuss implications for the instruction of these modal verbs in academic writing and in order to improve relevant teaching materials.

In this paper, I discuss Whiting’s (2021) account of rational belief and discuss some unresolved issues arising from its reliance on epistemic possibility and, by extension, perspective-relative aprioricity.

According to a prominent account of epistemic possibility endorsed by John Hawthorne and Jason Stanley (“H-S Account”), a proposition q is epistemically possible for a subject just in case what the subject knows doesn’t obviously entail not-q. I argue that H-S Account is false by its own lights by first showing that H-S Account entails a different account of epistemic possibility—q is epistemically possible for a subject just in case not-q is not obvious to that subject (“Obvious Account”)—and then showing that H-S Account is false on the basis of Obvious Account. Obvious Account is good news for fallibilists. H-S Account is in tension with fallibilism, which requires that fallibilist adherents of H-S Account do extra work to relieve the tension. Obvious Account, however, does not require any of this work; it is straightforwardly compatible with fallibilism. Obvious Account also has implications for the truth of concessive knowledge attributions (CKAs)—statements of the form: ‘I know p, but possibly q’, where q obviously entails not-p. Obvious Account allows some CKAs to be true, whereas H-S Account does not.

Abstract The present study uses self-paced reading as a measure of online processing and an acceptability judgement task as a measure of offline explicit linguistic knowledge, to understand L2 learners’ comprehension processes and their awareness of subtle differences between the modal auxiliaries may and can. Participants were two groups of university students: 42 native speakers of English and 41 native speakers of Croatian majoring in L2 English. The study is part of a larger project that has provided empirical evidence of the two modals, may and can, being mutually exclusive when denoting ability (can) and epistemic possibility (may) but equally acceptable in pragmatic choices expressing permission. The present results revealed that L1 and L2 speakers rated the acceptability of sentences in offline tasks similarly; however, L2 learners showed no sensitivity to verb–context mismatches in epistemic modality while demonstrating sensitivity when processing modals expressing ability. Implications for L2 acquisition of modals and future research are discussed.

I provide an account of the physical appropriate to the task of the physicalist while remaining faithful to the usage of “physical” natural to physicists. Physicalism is the thesis that everything in the world is physical, or reducible to the physical. I presuppose that some version of this position is a live epistemic possibility. The physicalist is confronted with Hempel’s dilemma: that physicalism is either false or contentless. The proposed account of the physical avoids both horns and generalizes a recent proposal by Vicente (2011). My account defines physicalism as the thesis that there are no objects that cannot be described by physical quantities. A dimensional account of physical quantities is given: quantities are determined by measurement procedures.

Abstract In the Introduction to the Critique of Pure Reason Kant raises a famous question: how is metaphysics possible as a science? Kant posed this question for his predecessors in early modern philosophy. I raise this question anew for the resurgence of metaphysics within analytic philosophy. I begin by dividing the question of the possibility of metaphysics into separate questions about its semantic and epistemic possibility, and translate them into contemporary terms as: (1) Why do terms in metaphysical theories refer? (2) How do we have knowledge in metaphysics? I then argue that the inflationary conception of metaphysics cannot explain the semantic possibility of metaphysics and, consequently, cannot explain its epistemic possibility. I then argue, more briefly, that a deflationary conception cannot satisfactorily answer the Kantian questions either. The critical path alone remains open.