Yiwen Zhan

The idea of fragmentalism has been proposed by Kit Fine as a non-standard view of tense realism. This paper examines a modal version of the view, called modal fragmentalism, which combines genuine realism and realism of modality. Modal fragmentalism has been recently discussed by Iaquinto. But unlike Iaquinto, who primarily focused on possibilities de re, in this paper, we focus on expressions of possibilities de dicto. We argue that the chief idea of modal realism should be that different worlds are distinguished not just in terms of how things are differently with respect to each world, but also in terms of how things could have been differently with respect to each world. This demands a realism-oriented semantics for suppositional contents, and more specifically, for conditionals. By deploying a multidimensional semantics for conditionals, we show that there are good reasons to consider modal fragmentalism as a serious approach in metaphysics, which shares many similarities with the fragmentalism of tense.

Rosenkranz (2021) offered a logic and a detailed account of justification, according to which justification that p can be analyzed as a form of second-level ignorance: ¬K¬Kp. An intuition behind the analysis is that the justified subject has the potential, at least in a nearby world, to either come to know p or come to know ¬Kp. However, given Rosenkranz’s hyperintensional semantics for modeling knowledge states, we can always construct, out of an ¬K¬K-agent’s knowledge state, epistemic possibilities that prohibit the agent from having that potential. This shows that Rosenkranz’s analysis is still insufficient for carrying all the epistemic weight underlying the notion of justification. A better analysis would require a deeper look into an agent’s knowledge structure and its involved modalities, which could be a lot more complex than what the ¬K¬K rule tells us.

This chapter aims to offer a brief survey of the methodology of the current volume. The foremost issue that requires particular clarification is the terminology of gongsheng. The reader will notice that not all contributions of this volume are using the term “gongsheng” literally. In the first half of the chapter, I explain how we employ a systematic treatment of this terminological issue during the editing of this volume. Since the research topics of this volume are significantly diverse, an illustration of its layout and its overall research background is offered. As this volume aims to explore the philosophical significance of the concept of gongsheng, I will also elaborate on the philosophical implications of our methodology. This will be the task of the second half of the chapter: I will discuss some philosophical complexities concerning the topic (dis-)continuity of this volume and then briefly examine its metaphysical implications.