Conceivability, Counterfactual Thinking and Philosophical Exceptionality of Modal Knowledge (original) (raw)

According to Williamson (The philosophy of philosophy, Blackwell, Oxford, 2007), our knowledge of metaphysical necessities and possibilities is just a “spe- cial case” of our knowledge of counterfactual conditionals. This subsumption of modal under counterfactual think- ing mainly serves a methodological role: to sign the end of “philosophical exceptionalism” in modal epistemol- ogy, namely the view that our knowledge of metaphysical modalities is obtained by means of a special, dedicated, possibly a priori, capacity. In this paper, I show that a counterfactual approach to modal epistemology is struc- turally similar to more traditional “conceivability-based” approaches. On this basis, I then show that the counterfac- tual approach suffers some of the same problems and I con- clude that it is still based on a quite exceptional capacity to determine the truth of modal metaphysical claims. Given that, for Williamson, the epistemology of thought experi- ments should also be subsumed under the counterfactual approach, the problem I raise in this paper has conse- quences for his approach to thought experiments.

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