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Mind Advance Access originally published online on September 7, 2009
Mind 2009 118(471):777-784; doi:10.1093/mind/fzp105
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© Sorensen 2009

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Meta-agnosticism: Higher Order Epistemic Possibility

Roy Sorensen

Department of Philosophy Washington University in St Louis One Brookings Drive – Campus Box 1073 Wilson Hall St. Louis, MO 63130 USA sorensen{at}wustl.edu


  Abstract

In ‘Epistemic Modals’ (2007), Seth Yalcin proposes Stalnaker-style semantics for epistemic possibility. He is inspired by John MacFarlane’s ingenious defence of relativism, in which claims of epistemic possibility are made rigidly from the perspective of the assessor’s actual stock of information (rather than from the speaker’s knowledge base or that of his audience or community). The innovations of MacFarlane and Yalcin independently reinforce the modal collapse espoused by Jaakko Hintikka in his 1962 epistemic logic (which relied on the implausible KK principle and heavy idealizations). I respond to this new challenge with fresh objections to the underlying S4 equivalence: {lozenge}{lozenge}p {leftrightarrow} {lozenge}p. I also propose counter-analyses of the intriguing data which Yalcin cites in support of his new semantics. A key collateral motivation for this defence of irredundant iterations is to ward off a threat to higher order vagueness.


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Mind, July 1, 2009; 118(471): 785 - 793.
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