...Joseph Levine Type-B materialists (to use David Chalmers's jargon) claim that though zombies are conceivable, they are not metaphysically possible. This article calls this position regarding the relation between metaphysical and epistemic modality “modal autonomism,” as opposed to the “modal...

...David Boylan Cariani Fabrizio , The Modal Future . Cambridge : Cambridge University Press , 2021 . xxv + 292 pp. © 2023 by Cornell University 2023 Cariani’s The Modal Future is a book about future language. At its heart is a challenge to the received symmetric picture...

...Colin McLear Stang Nicholas , Kant's Modal Metaphysics . Oxford: Oxford University Press , 2016 . 349 pp . © 2018 by Cornell University 2018 Anglophone philosophers with even a passing knowledge of Kant are no doubt familiar with some of his most notable arguments...

...Yde Venema MODAL LOGIC. Oxford Logic Guides 35. By Alexander Chagrov and Michael Zakharyaschev. New York: Oxford University Press, Clarendon Press, 1997. Pp. xv, 605. Cornell University 2000 BOOK REWEWS Priorean.” Van Benthem seems to dismiss out of hand...

...Graeme Forbes In this critical review I discuss the main themes of the papers in Kit Fine's Modality and Tense: Philosophical Papers . These themes are that modal operators are intelligible in their own right and that actualist quantifiers are to be taken as basic with respect to possibilist...

...Andrew Stephenson This essay considers Kant’s theory of modality in light of a debate in contemporary modal metaphysics and modal logic concerning the Barcan formulas. The comparison provides a new and fruitful perspective on Kant’s complex and sometimes confusing claims about possibility...

...Dilip Ninan This essay presents a puzzle concerning the interaction of epistemic modals, singular terms, and quantifiers. The puzzle poses a number of problems for both static and dynamic theories of epistemic modals. The trouble arises because neither approach takes into account the fact...

... and not p⌝ and ⌜Not p and might p⌝ are inconsistent? To make sense of this situation, I propose a new theory of epistemic modals that aims to account for their subtle embedding behavior and shed new light on the dynamics of information in natural language. A more substantial departure concerns order...

...Matthew Mandelkern; Ginger Schultheis; David Boylan This essay proposes a new theory of agentive modals : ability modals and their duals, compulsion modals. After criticizing existing approaches—the existential quantificational analysis, the universal quantificational analysis, and the conditional...

...Malte Willer A dynamic semantics for epistemically modalized sentences is an attractive alternative to the orthodox view that our best theory of meaning ascribes to such sentences truth-conditions relative to what is known. This essay demonstrates that a dynamic theory about might and must offers...

...Malte Willer Egan Andy and Weatherson Brian , eds., Epistemic Modality . New York : Oxford University Press , 2011 . vi+335 pp. © 2013 by Cornell University 2013 This is a long-anticipated collection of ten essays on epistemic modality by leading thinkers...

...Samuel Newlands Leibniz’s views on modality are among the most discussed by his interpreters. Although most of the discussion has focused on Leibniz’s analyses of modality, this essay explores Leibniz’s grounding of modality. Leibniz holds that possibilities and possibilia are grounded...

...Paolo Santorio According to the orthodox account developed by Kaplan, indexicals like I, you , and now invariably refer to elements of the context of speech. This essay argues that the orthodoxy is wrong. I, you , and the like are shifted by certain modal operators and hence can fail to refer...

... be taller than I would be’ or ‘if I am seven feet tall, I am taller than I am’. These examples exemplify the fact that whether a sentence's evaluation remains at the actual world in the scope of a modal or conditional depends on the combination of mood in the embedded and matrix clauses rather than...

... to consider particles fundamental, with metaphysical explanation snaking upward from the many. There seem to be physical and modal considerations that favor the monistic view. Physically, there is good evidence that the cosmos forms an entangled system and good reason to treat entangled systems as irreducible...

... need in order to write the “book of the world.” This paper attempts to make good on this metaphor. To that end, a modality is introduced that, put informally, stands to propositions as logical truth stands to sentences. The resulting theory, formulated in higher-order logic, also vindicates the Humean...

... attributing any particular meaning to an expression is modally plastic: its truth depends very sensitively on the exact microphysical state of the world. However, such plasticity seems to threaten ordinary counterfactuals whose consequents contain speech reports, since it is hard to see how we could...

... respects (for example, modally or causally), it satisfies this independence-by-nature condition. I will spell out several problems with existing interpretations before turning to my positive proposal. Stated briefly, the proposal is that in characterizing substance, Descartes invokes a type...

... from its restrictor. The article shows that split readings can occur not only with attitude verbs but with modals, tense, and aspectual markers as well. The upshot of the article is that although there is a real threat to our comfortable assumption that the sort of bare quantification we routinely...

... to causal beliefs, and one-boxers to evidential beliefs. The essay notes that a similar issue can arise when the modality in question is chance, rather than causation. In this case, the conflict is between decision rules based on credences guided solely by chances, and rules based on credences guided...