Til Eyinck

Testimony is a central concept in the epistemological debate on knowledge and learning. It is therefore surprising that testimony plays a minor role in the empirical literature on cultural learning. This raises the question of whether our approach to knowledge in epistemology might be missing out on some things when applied to cultural knowledge and its transmission. By taking the semantic component of knowledge in the compound folk-lore at face value, we aim to explore whether the concept of folklore could potentially help out here. Three persistent puzzles concerning folklore and its study are discussed to this end: (1) What is the ontological status of folkloric objects of study? (2) How shall one safeguard folkloric objects, depending on different possible answers to the ontological question? (3) How could we distinguish fake-lore, i.e. folklore that is merely seemingly representative of epistemic groups, from more generally representative folklore?

At first glance, impossible world semantics appear to be useful adaptations of normal modal logic. Proponents of impossible worlds argue, e.g., that in the context of metaphysical disagreement, impossible worlds would provide a key to modelling the respective dispute situation. The same philosophers also argue that we need impossible worlds to model what they consider to be the conceivability of logical impossibilities. With the help of Wittgenstein’s early philosophy, or, better said, with what I believe to be a visualisation of his ideas on nesting models for possibility, I develop some thoughts on the likely shared weaknesses of such arguments for nonnormal world approaches. Said goes hand in hand with the supplementary proposal of rethinking our conventional nesting models for possibility.

Some philosophers advance the claim that the phenomena of logical omniscience and of the indiscernibility of metaphysical statements, which arise in (certain) interpretations of normal modal logic, provide strong reasons in favour of impossible world approaches. These two specific lines of argument will be presented and discussed in this paper. Contrary to the recent much-held view that the characteristics of these two phenomena provide us with strong reasons to adopt impossible world approaches, the view defended here is that no such ‘knock-down arguments’ do emanate on those grounds. This is not to rule out that there cannot be any other good reasons for assuming impossible world semantics. However, the discussion of a further argument for impossible worlds will suggest that different attempts to argue for them likely present intertwined problems.