https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4416-3923
![Sample our Humanities journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5939/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Humanities.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
Talk of metaphysical modality as “absolute” is ambiguous, as it appears to convey multiple ideas. Metaphysical possibility is supposedly completely unrestricted or unqualified; metaphysical necessity is unconditional and exceptionless. Moreover, metaphysical modality is thought to be absolute in the sense that it's real or genuine and the most objective modality: metaphysical possibility and necessity capture ways things could and must have really been. As we disentangle these ideas, certain talk of metaphysical modality qua “absolute” turns out to be misguided. Metaphysical possibility isn't completely unrestricted or most inclusive compared to the other modalities; metaphysical necessity, like all kinds of necessities, is relative to or conditional upon a specific framework of reference. Still, metaphysical modality captures how things could and must have really been most generally because it deals with reality and the nature of things or their essence. That's the chief interest of metaphysics. Arguments against the alleged absoluteness of metaphysical modality may not thereby undermine its philosophical significance.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 For Berto and Jago (Citation2019), the mainstream view is that there are three kinds of absolute modality qua unrestricted modality: metaphysical, logical, and mathematical necessity. We’ll see that some of the criticisms against the idea that metaphysical necessity is absolute also apply to logical necessity. We can predict that similar considerations apply, mutatis mutandis, to mathematical necessity.
2 That’s a view Fine (Citation2005) labels ‘modal monism’ – although he defends modal pluralism. He believes that natural, metaphysical, and normative necessity are incommensurable and irreducible. Note also that Fine, differently from Hale, doesn’t call the most basic necessity ‘absolute’.
3 Importantly, Sider uses the relativization strategy within a deflationist ‘Humean’ framework, where there’s no ‘joint-carving’ or natural fact about what’s necessary/possible, but reality is instead fundamentally amodal. Particularly, for Sider, ‘modal axioms are simply certain chosen true sentences’, which we select more or less arbitrarily based on our interests (Citation2011, 271). But note that the relativization strategy need not entail deflationism about necessity or the thesis that basic modal truths are interest-relative.
4 The relativization strategy doesn’t obviously amount to a reduction of the various kinds of necessity to logical necessity. We can use logical necessity to better understand or define the other modalities, without thereby aiming to eliminate or reduce the latter to the former. See Leech (Citation2016) for a convincing argument to this effect.
5 Hale (Citation2013, 102). For further discussion, see Lowe (Citation1998), and Shalkowski (Citation2004).
6 A more complex sort of relativization strategy for metaphysical modality implements a double-indexing semantics for modal languages, which includes pragmatic considerations: see Hellie, Murray, and Wilson (Citation2021).
7 See e.g. Beall and Restall (Citation2000, Citation2006). Restall (Citation2002) aptly distinguishes this sort of pluralism concerning logical consequence or validity from a different, ‘Carnapian’ pluralism that targets instead the meaning of logical connectives and quantifiers. For some helpful overview of logical pluralism: Cook (Citation2010); Priest (Citation2006: ch. 12) and Russell (Citation2019).
8 This contrast is explicitly drawn for example by Berto and Jago: ‘Other [non-absolute] modal notions … are naturally understood as restricted forms of necessity or possibility. Something can count as R-necessary, for some relativized modal notion R, even if it fails to hold at some possible world or other’ (Citation2019, 14–15).
9 Kment analogously points out that necessity claims are ‘both absolute and context-dependent’ (Citation2014, 57).
10 Importantly, rejecting completely unrestricted possibility doesn’t entail endorsing deflationism about modality Sider-style. Kment’s view, for example, is far from any such implication, and so is my own, as we will see.
11 One might doubt that satisfying the T axiom is even a necessary condition for being real. Take the normative truths. Although deontological necessity doesn’t satisfy the T axiom, if moral realism is true, certain moral truths are necessary in an ‘absolute' sense. They will be substantive (plausibly, synthetic a priori) and thus real.
12 The following discussion of modal monism is partly drawn from my ‘Semantic Rules, Modal Knowledge, and Analyticity’ (Mallozzi Citation2023).
13 The other main strategy for pursuing this sort of monism, as we saw, is relativization (section 2). The most fundamental type of necessity in that case is logical necessity.
14 Thanks to Matti Eklund for raising this issue.
15 Thanks to Nate Bice, Paul Boghossian, Matti Eklund, Tristan Haze, Graham Priest, Sonia Roca-Royes, Anand Vaidya, Michael Wallner, Nathan Wildman, and an anonymous referee for Inquiry for helpful comments on a previous draft. Thanks also to the audience at the Logic and Metaphysics Workshop, CUNY Graduate Center in March 2020.