Modal Argument Research Articles

Political rhetoric in the Hungarian press during the communist regime

A previous analysis of post-1989 editorials in a Hungarian newspaper investigated ideological developments in Hungary in the first years after the communist regime had been replaced by elected governments. Using the same method, we here investigate whether the same developments may have extended prior to Hungary’s democratic changes. Such extension might have entailed a gradual increase in modal rhetoric indicative of free market or social justice. However, no support is found for this in Hungary’s pre-1990 state-controlled media. Instead, modal arguments only appear with noteworthy frequency after 1986 and then only ones emphasizing Hungarians’ inevitabilities and possibilities without any consistent rationale.

Can I survive without my body? Undercutting the Modal Argument

Modal Arguments in the philosophy of mind purport to show that the body is not necessary for a human person’s existence. The key premise in these arguments are generally supported with thought experiments (e.g. I could exist either in some other bodily form or in a disembodied state). I argue that Christians endorsing the Doctrine of the Resurrection have good reason to deny this key premise. Traditional Christianity affirms that eschatological human existence is an embodied existence in the very bodies we inhabited while alive. The raises the Resurrection Question: why would God go through the trouble of resurrecting those bodies? I argue that adequately answering this question requires give up on Modal Arguments within the philosophy of mind.

The Modal Argument against Nominal Description Theory

Abstract The paper examines Loar's and Bach's defence of Nominal Description Theory against Kripkean Modal Argument (MA). Using formal tools of hyperintensional logic, I discriminate three kinds of nominal description which are possible substitutes for a proper name, thus considering various readings of the MA. On its natural understanding, the MA is valid { contrary to what Loar and Bach say. On the other hand, the soundness of the MA remains doubtful, as pointed out already by Loar and Bach

The Inconceivable Popularity of Conceivability Arguments

Famous examples of conceivability arguments include (i) Descartes’ argument for mind-body dualism, (ii) Kripke's ‘modal argument’ against psychophysical identity theory, (iii) Chalmers’ ‘zombie argument’ against materialism, and (iv) modal versions of the ontological argument for theism. In this paper, we show that for any such conceivability argument, C, there is a corresponding ‘mirror argument’, M. M is deductively valid and has a conclusion that contradicts C's conclusion. Hence, a proponent of C—henceforth, a ‘conceivabilist’—can be warranted in holding that C's premises are conjointly true only if she can find fault with one of M's premises. But M's premises are modelled on a pair of C's premises. The same reasoning that supports the latter supports the former. For this reason, a conceivabilist can repudiate M's premises only on pain of severely undermining C's premises. We conclude on this basis that all conceivability arguments, including each of (i)–(iv), are fallacious.

Could God Fail to Exist?

I apply developments in modal reasoning to the question of whether God has necessary existence. My larger task is to assess the main reasons to think that God is not a metaphysically necessary being. I consider Hume’s conceivability-based argument, and then I pay attention to more recent arguments, including Swinburne’s neo-Humean argument and the subtraction argument. I show that such arguments face a ‘parity’ problem, since the very reasoning that gets them off the ground also launches parallel arguments for an opposite conclusion. In my closing section, I sketch an argument schema designed to illustrate a new, general strategy for deducing the necessary existence of God by building upon recent modal cosmological arguments.

Conceivability, possibility and the resurrection of material beings

In his 1998 postscript to ‘The Possibility of Resurrection’ Peter van Inwagen argues that the scenario he describes by which God might resurrect a human organism, even though probably not true (cf. van Inwagen in, The possibility of resurrection and other essays in Christian apologetics, Westview Press, Boulder, 1998b, p. 51), is still conceivable and, consequently, ‘serves to establish a possibility’ (van Inwagen in, The possibility of resurrection and other essays in Christian apologetics, Westview Press, Boulder, 1998b, p. 51), namely, the metaphysical possibility of the resurrection of material beings. Van Inwagen, however, has also argued in favour of ‘modal scepticism’ [van Inwagen in, God, knowledge and mystery: essays in philosophical theology, Cornell University Press, Ithaca 1995b, pp. 11–12; van Inwagen in, Philos Stud 92:67–84 (69), 1998a]. That is, he thinks that we should limit all our claims about what is possible to ‘ordinary propositions about everyday matters’ (van Inwagen in, Philos Stud 92:67–84 (76), 1998a). In this paper I argue that van Inwagen’s modal argument as found in ‘The Possibility of Resurrection’ (van Inwagen in, The possibility of resurrection and other essays in Christian apologetics, Westview Press, Boulder, 1998b) is inconsistent with his modal scepticism as found in ‘Modal Epistemology’ (van Inwagen in, Philos Stud 92:67–84, 1998a). In consequence, I argue that, given his modal scepticism, the task van Inwagen set himself in ‘The Possibility of Resurrection’ (to establish the possibility of the Resurrection) has not been achieved.

Análise das objeções ao significado dos nomes próprios na teoria matalinguística

http://dx.doi.org/10.5007/1808-1711.2015v19n3p405In this paper I examine the three known objections to metalinguistic semantic theory of proper names: the objection of generalization, the objection of circularity, and the objection arising from Kripke’s modal argument. I’m trying to demonstrate that these objections are not conclusive as refutation or rejection of metalinguistic theory. I argue that this is a not a theory of reference but rather of the meaning or semantic value of proper names. Thus, the semantic value of a proper name “N” is “The bearer of ‘N’.” In this approach the significance of this proper name unifies all the possibilities for its referential use and allow us to defend that the name itself is an expression of language, despite arguments to the contrary.

The Principle of Sufficient Reason Defended: There Is No Conjunction of All Contingently True Propositions

Toward the end of his classic treatise An Essay on Free Will, Peter van Inwagen offers a modal argument against the Principle of Sufficient Reason which he argues shows that the principle “collapses all modal distinctions.” In this paper, a critical flaw in this argument is shown to lie in van Inwagen’s beginning assumption that there is such a thing as the conjunction of all contingently true propositions. This is shown to follow from Cantor’s theorem and a property of conjunction with respect to contingent propositions. Given the failure of this assumption, van Inwagen’s argument against the Principle of Sufficient Reason cannot succeed, at least not without the addition of some remarkable and previously unacknowledged qualifications.

Modal Arguments against Physicalism in View of Scientific Findings Concerning Pain

Modal Arguments against Physicalism in View of Scientific Findings Concerning Pain

The Modal Argument against Materialism and Intertheoretic Identities

In this paper I discuss, on behalf of the materialist, a consideration against the modal or conceivability argument against materialism which was first voiced in the third lecture of Naming and Necessity. This consideration is based on intertheoretic identities, statements in which both terms flanking the identity sign are theoretical. I argue that the defender of the conceivability argument has trouble to account for the appearance of contingency in those types of necessary identities. In fact, intertheoretic identities pose a formidable dilemma for the defender of the modal argument and actually force the antimaterialist to say more about the semantics of theoretical terms than is implicit in standard discussions of the argument. I myself consider several options in this regard, the upshot being, however, that none of the alternative semantics for theoretical terms available to the antimaterialist is good enough to achieve the twofold aim which her modal argument requires, namely, to account for the a posteriori necessity of identities of this sort and, at the same time, to preserve her antimaterialist argument. Finally, in the last part of the paper, I argue that my defense of materialism can withstand some worries coming from David Chalmers’ recent views on a priori scrutability.

Anselm’s Other Argument by A. D. Smith (review)

Reviewed by: Anselm’s Other Argument by A. D. Smith Sandra L. Visser A. D. Smith. Anselm’s Other Argument. Cambridge-London: Harvard University Press, 2014. Pp. xi + 244. Cloth, $49.95. Reading Smith’s Anselm’s Other Argument can be puzzling if one neglects to first read the introduction in which Smith explains that this book arose from work he was doing on a different book on Spinoza. Understanding that helps one understand why it might be that most of the chapters begin where contemporary scholars might rarely choose to begin, with Norman Malcolm and Charles Hartshorne, and why it takes a long, but inadequate and incomplete (at least for those who are conversant with the current literature), detour into considerations of omnipotence, while it examines the relevant passages of Anselm’s Proslogion arguments, before ending with the defense of a different argument that Anselm makes explicit in his Reply to Gaunilo. Despite this at times unhelpful approach to Anselm’s work, at each step of the way, Smith’s scholarship is careful, fair, and very good. Most of the discussions are highly illuminating and typically convincing. The criticisms of Malcolm, Hartshorne, and Katherin Rogers, the one contemporary Anselm scholar Smith treats at length, are nuanced and persuasive. Yet the route that Smith takes in his research, and that appears duplicated in his book, is probably not the one others would find most profitable when considering Anselm’s arguments for the existence of something greater than which cannot be conceived. One of the two central arguments of Smith’s work is that there is no modal ontological argument in Anselm’s Proslogion. Smith closely analyzes the most commonly referenced arguments offered as candidates, namely, those found in Proslogion 3 and Anselm’s Reply to Gaunilo. In each case, Smith argues that the arguments are not properly understood as modal ontological arguments. Smith’s arguments in this section of the book rest on three key premises, which he defends throughout the course of the book. My presentation does not do the subtlety of his arguments justice, but I believe these are fair statements of them. First, conceivability is not possibility. It is important for Anselm that inconceivability entails impossibility; however, one cannot conceive anything that contradicts reason. Second, because conceivability is not possibility, Anselm’s arguments require substantive metaphysical claims. The most important of these metaphysical claims is that “a thing that does not exist is able not to exist is true . . . because and only because there is something that actually exists that has a power over the thing’s existence” (112). It is because nothing has power over something than which nothing greater can be conceived that it is not conceivable for that thing not to exist. Third, modal ontological arguments do not require such substantive metaphysical claims in order for their inferences to go through. Smith concludes that Anselm’s arguments are not modal arguments at all. Smith convincingly argues that Anselm’s arguments cannot be easily translated into an argument that relies on a system of modal logic without loss of information. The care that Smith takes on this point requires some rather technical discussions of contemporary modal systems including S5 and B. The sometimes dense discussion helps the reader appreciate in what ways Anselm’s modal concepts do not map onto our own. But Smith’s argument [End Page 781] might also lead the reader to believe that there is a bigger gap between Anselm’s arguments and ours. That is misleading. There is some very heavy metaphysical work going on in the premise necessary for a contemporary modal argument that it is possible that God exists. In fact, in order to defend that premise, many of Anselm’s arguments and premises from his own arguments might be philosophically helpful. What of Anselm’s other argument and the second central piece of Smith’s work? The argument Smith examines is an interesting one Anselm offers in the Replies. Anselm uses the argument to clarify or further unpack why it is that Anselm believes that something than which a greater cannot be conceived exists. It is an argument that starts from the claim that such a being...

Do Apparently Empty Names Help Millianism Prevail Against Widescopism? A Note

Do Apparently Empty Names Help <scp>M</scp>illianism Prevail Against Widescopism? A Note

Fundamentality without Foundations

A commonly held view is that a central aim of metaphysics is to give a fundamental account of reality which refers only to the fundamental entities. But a puzzle arises. It is at least a working hypothesis for those pursuing the aim that, first, there must be fundamental entities. But, second, it also seems possible that the world has no foundation, with each entity depending on others. These two claims are inconsistent with the widely held third claim that the fundamental just is the foundational. It is tempting to resolve the puzzle by rejecting the first or second claim, perhaps because it is obscure how the third claim might plausibly be challenged. But I develop a new analysis of fundamentality which challenges the third claim by allowing for an entity to be fundamental without being foundational. The analysis, roughly, is that an entity is fundamental (or ineliminable, as I call it) just in case not all facts about it are grounded in facts about other entities. The possibility of fundamentality without foundations not only provides for a novel resolution to the puzzle, but has applications to some live debates: for example, it undermines Jonathan Schaffer's modal argument for priority monism.

Estimation of the Area of a Reverberant Plate Using Average Reverberation Properties

This paper aims to present an original method for the estimation of the area of thin plates of arbitrary geometrical shapes. This method relies on the acquisition and ensemble processing of reverberated elastic signals on few sensors. The acoustical Green's function in a reverberant solid medium is modeled by a nonstationary random process based on the image-sources method. In that way, mathematical expectations of the signal envelopes can be analytically related to reverberation properties and structural parameters such as plate area, group velocity, or source-receiver distance. Then, a simple curve fitting applied to an ensemble average over N realizations of the late envelopes allows to estimate a global term involving the values of structural parameters. From simple statistical modal arguments, it is shown that the obtained relation depends on the plate area and not on the plate shape. Finally, by considering an additional relation obtained from the early characteristics (treated in a deterministic way) of the reverberation signals, it is possible to deduce the area value. This estimation is performed without geometrical measurements and requires an access to only a small portion of the plate. Furthermore, this method does not require any time measurement nor trigger synchronization between the input channels of instrumentation (between measured signals), thus implying low hardware constraints. Experimental results obtained on metallic plates with free boundary conditions and embedded window glasses will be presented. Areas of up to several meter-squares are correctly estimated with a relative error of a few percents.

Files, Indexicals and Descriptivism

Recanati’s book contains stimulating discussions of a great many interesting problems and repays careful reading. My comments focus on some questions about indexicals and descriptions. Recanati defends Singularism against Descriptivism. The Singularist claims (i) the semantic contribution of a referring term to the proposition expressed by an utterance in which it figures is its referent; (ii) one needs acquaintance with, or more generally an epistemically rewarding (ER) relation to the referent, if one is to think a singular thought about it. On Recanati’s view, Singularists can better defend these two theses by including mental files in their account, using files to play the roles usually assigned to modes of presentation. Descriptivism denies (i), holding that referring terms contribute descriptive content to the proposition expressed, where this content in turn determines reference. Descriptivism runs into trouble, according to Recanati, because it neglects the ‘relational character of reference determination’ (22). He makes a good point here — this neglect is arguably the root of Descriptivism’s vulnerability to the socalled ‘modal argument.’1 But of course Descriptivism can be modified to address the problem by injecting relational properties into the descriptive content associated with a referring term.2 For example, one sees Mt. Blanc and thinks ‘that peak is dramatic.’ The amended

Modality, semantics, and consciousness

The Character of Consciousness brings together most of the important papers that Chalmers has written on the topic of consciousness since (and a couple before) the publication of his book, The Conscious Mind. He covers such topics as the identification of neural correlates of consciousness, the modal argument against materialism, the ‘‘phenomenal concepts’’ strategy, representationalism and the nature of color experience, and the unity of consciousness. As I am in agreement with, or at least sympathetic to, a lot of what he has to say on these topics, and since this is supposed to be a critical response to the book, I will limit my remarks to the principal area where we still differ: the modal argument against materialism. Let me begin with a general characterization of how I see the disagreement between us, and then move to the details. Both Chalmers and I see a deep epistemic gap between physical (including functional, or computational) accounts of the mind/ brain and ordinary descriptions of our phenomenally conscious experience. We both maintain that the ‘‘hard problem’’, or ‘‘the explanatory gap’’ constitutes a serious challenge to materialism in the philosophy of mind. But we differ significantly on the nature of that challenge. I have in fact of late come closer to Chalmers in seeing the explanatory gap as a positive argument for non-materialism about consciousness, but where I see the argument as essentially abductive he sees it as demonstrative. I view the inference from the explanatory gap to non-materialism as basically an instance of inference to the best explanation; the best explanation of the epistemic gap is that there is a metaphysical gap (the nature of which I find obscure,

Metalinguistic Descriptivism for Millians

Metalinguistic descriptivism is the view that proper names are semantically equivalent to descriptions featuring their own quotations (e.g., ‘Socrates’ means ‘the bearer of “Socrates”’). The present paper shows that Millians can actually accept an inferential version of this equivalence thesis without running afoul of the modal argument. Indeed, they should: for it preserves the explanatory virtues of more familiar forms of descriptivism while avoiding objections (old and new) to Kent Bach's nominal description theory. We can make significant progress on Frege's puzzle and Plato's beard without committing ourselves one way or the other on the semantic values of proper names. The view on offer can also be motivated by analogy with Tarski's schema T, inviting the idea that the equivalence between a name and the associated nominal description has more to do with the semantics of representational locutions than it does with names per se. My response to the modal argument exploits the Kripkean distinction between reference at a world and reference in a world, and can be accepted by metalinguistic descriptivists and Millians alike.

Names and Obstinate Rigidity

AbstractNames are rigid designators, but what kind of rigidity do they exhibit? Both “obstinately” and “persistently” rigid designators pick out O at every world at which they pick out anything at all. They differ in that obstinately rigid designators also pick out O at worlds at which O fails to exist; persistently rigid designators have no extension whatsoever at worlds at which O fails to exist. The question whether names are obstinate or persistent arises in two contexts: in arguments against rigidified descriptivism (on the grounds that names and rigidified descriptions exhibit different kinds of rigidity) and in considerations about what it means for an expression to be “directly referential.” This paper contends that names are persistent, not obstinate. The position thus clarifies the relationship between Millian theories of names and rigid designation, in addition to undermining attempts to rehabilitate the modal argument against rigidified descriptivism.

Actual Time and Possible Change

Sider (2001) and Hawley (2001) argue that, in order to account for the mere possibility of change, temporal parts must be as fine-grained as possible change, and hence as fine-grained as time. However, when dealing with metaphysical possibility, the fine-grainedness of actual time and the fine-grainedness of possible change can come apart. Once this is taken into account, we see that, on certain assumptions about the actual microstructure of time, the modal arguments of Sider and Hawley lead to the problematic claim that temporal parts are more fine-grained than time. The utility of a temporal parts theory thus seems to be sensitive to metaphysically contingent facts concerning the microstructure of time.

A Flaw in Kripke’s Modal Argument?

The response to Kripke’s modal argument I wish to propose appeals to the distinction between indicative descriptions, i.e., descriptions formed using indicative verb forms, and what I shall call subjunctive descriptions, descriptions formed using non-indicative verb forms used in subjunctive conditionals. The contrast is between ‘the person who is richer than anyone else in the world’ and ‘the person who would have been richer than anyone else in the world’. The response to Kripke’s modal argument is that indicative descriptions are always rigid designators and so do not contrast with proper names.