Theodore Locke

Some have argued that certain claims about the natural world, e.g., the laws of nature, are not metaphysically necessary, but they are necessary in some more restricted, natural sense. In this paper, I give preliminary arguments for the existence of social necessities, i.e., claims about social reality that are necessary. I then argue that many social necessities are not metaphysically necessary and cannot be explained in terms of metaphysical necessity. Thus, there is a kind of modality distinct from metaphysical modality, i.e., social modality. In turn, this has important methodological upshots. Questions about what is socially possible are best raised and resolved from the perspective and interests of social inquirers trying to understand historical and causal specificities of the actual world. Moreover, the arguments I give raise pressing questions about modal injustice, i.e., how a person or group can be harmed in virtue of what social possibilities exist for them.

Literal talk of possible worlds and similarity between them is thought to presuppose accepting substantive forms of realism about possible worlds. According to modal normativism, basic modal claims—i.e. claims of metaphysical necessity and possibility—are not descriptive claims reporting on possible worlds, primitive modal facts, or any kind of modal truth maker. Instead, the function of basic modal discourse is normative: basic modal claims express and endorse semantic rules governing the terms involved in those claims. Taking the two idea together, it might be thought that modal normativism should avoid literal talk about possible worlds or should accept a form of fictionalism about possible worlds. In this paper, I will argue that this is false: modal normativism can and ought to keep literal talk of possible worlds and similarity between them. I will show how literal talk of worlds quite naturally falls out the normativist’s characterization of the function of modal discourse. Moreover, I will show how literal talk of similarity between worlds naturally falls out of our practice of expressing semantic rules using counterfactual claims on the normativist account.

I combine personal narrative, prose poetry, and philosophical methods to argue that grief is a response to a metaphysical injury. Building on the theoretical work of others, I use personal narrative to develop the premise that persons are partly constituted by their relationships. Therefore, when a relationship to, say, a caretaker is severed, the bereaved literally loses a part of their self, and grief is a response to that injury. My argument is complicated by relationships where a caretaker sometimes acted in abusive ways. So, I discuss one way a relationship partly founded on abuse can be a proper object of grief. I also argue that since grief is a response to a metaphysical injury, a proper response to grief ought to be based on care rather than rational evaluation. Finally, the essay itself is not merely an act of descriptive or argumentative narration but is itself an act of repair.

The problem of how we could come to know modal facts has been notorious for centuries. In this paper, Theodore Locke and Amie Thomasson defend a ‘modal normativist’ approach to understanding claims about metaphysical necessity and possibility—a view that claims to be able to demystify metaphysical modal knowledge, by showing how modal knowledge may be acquired through conceptual mastery, reasoning abilities, and empirical knowledge. Antonella Mallozzi (this volume) argues that normativists cannot deflate modal knowledge in that way, for they must somewhere implicitly presuppose knowledge of ‘essentialist principles and information’ to justify their claim to know metaphysical modal facts. In response, the authors argue that that is not so, by clarifying the ways in which modal normativists think we can come to acquire modal knowledge—and by showing how the account can be extended to demystify our knowledge of essentialist principles and facts as well.

I expand modal normativism, a theory of metaphysical modality, to give a normativist account of metaphysical explanation. According to modal normativism, basic modal claims do not have a descriptive function, but instead have the normative function of enabling language users to express semantic rules that govern the use of ordinary non-modal vocabulary. However, a worry for modal normativism is that it doesn’t keep up with all of the important and interesting metaphysics we can do by giving and evaluating metaphysical explanations. So, I advance modal normativism by arguing that metaphysical explanations also have a normative rather than descriptive function. In particular, non-causal explanatory claims have formal and semantic properties that make them expressively stricter than basic modal claims and so are better suited to express fine-grained aspects of semantic rules. A major payoff of my normativist account of metaphysical explanations is that it yields a plausible story about how we come to evaluate and know metaphysical explanations—we do this primarily by conceptual analysis. I also respond to a number of objections, including the objection that the epistemic payoffs of my view are not worth the metaphysical costs.

Counterpossibles are counterfactuals that involve some metaphysical impossibility. Modal normativism is a non-descriptivist account of metaphysical necessity and possibility according to which modal claims, e.g. ‘necessarily, all bachelors are unmarried’, do not function as descriptive claims about the modal nature of reality but function as normative illustrations of constitutive rules and permissions that govern the use of ordinary non-modal vocabulary, e.g. ‘bachelor’. In this paper, I assume modal normativism and develop a novel account of counterpossibles and claims about metaphysical similarity between possible and impossible worlds. I argue that considerations of metaphysical similarity between various impossible worlds and the actual world only require us to tacitly consider how the actual constitutive rules that govern the use of our terms change in order to accommodate the description of some hypothetical impossible scenario. I then argue for my account by raising worries for alternative epistemic and realist accounts of counterpossibles and showing how my account avoids those worries.