Methodological Advantages

This chapter makes the case that modal normativism also brings significant methodological advantages. First, it can provide a much-needed justification of using intuitions, thought experiments, and a form of conceptual analysis, in answering metaphysical modal questions. Second, it provides a straightforward methodology for answering such questions—considered as “internal” questions—and gives reasons for thinking that some such questions are simply unanswerable. But such questions may also be addressed as external questions, where we are concerned not with what rules our terms do follow, but what rules they should follow, and what linguistic and conceptual schemes we should use. This gives us the means for understanding some debates about metaphysical modality as engaged in metalinguistic negotiation and conceptual engineering—and thereby preserving the idea that such debates may be deep and important.

Other Objections to Modal Normativism

This chapter responds to other objections to modal normativism, including alleged counterexamples in which we have an apparent rule without a necessity (for example, in “I am here now”), or in which we appear to have a necessity without a rule (for example, in claims that numbers exist necessarily). It then turns to respond to allegations that the view is implicitly circular, since semantic rules must themselves be understood in modal terms, or since we must also take into account the consequences of the rules and so invoke a notion of logical necessity. In responding to these objections, the chapter also points to non-descriptivist approaches that have been developed for nomological necessity and logical necessity.

Epistemological Advantages

This chapter argues that accepting modal normativism brings significant epistemological advantages. Those who aim to account for modal knowledge face the integration challenge of reconciling an account of what is involved in knowing modal truths with a plausible story about how we can come to know them, and the reliability challenge of explaining how we could have evolved to have a reliable faculty for coming to know modal truths. Recent empiricist accounts of modal knowledge cannot solve these problems regarding specifically metaphysical modal truths—leaving us with the threat of skepticism about large portions of metaphysics. However, by giving a different functional story, the modal normativist can develop a plausible response to the remaining versions of both of these classic problems for modal epistemology. Modal normativists can also respond to further worries parallel to those raised by Sharon Street’s evolutionary debunking arguments in meta-ethics.

Ontological Advantages

This chapter aims to make clear the ontological consequences of adopting a modal normativist position. By combining normativism with the easy approach to ontology, we can see that modal normativism gives us a form of simple realism, according to which there are modal facts, properties, and even possible worlds, in the only sense that has sense. Such entities are not, however, “posited” as truthmakers that are supposed to “explain” what “makes our modal claims true.” But although the normativist accepts that there are modal facts and properties, the view also brings ontological advantages, avoiding ontological problems that plague traditional realist views, including placement problems and the grounding problem. The normativist view is also compared here to the forms of “classificatory conventionalism” advocated by Ross Cameron and Theodore Sider.

Norms and Necessity

This book develops a new approach to understanding our claims about what is metaphysically necessary or possible: modal normativism. While claims about what is metaphysically necessary or possible have long played a central role in metaphysics and other areas of philosophy, such claims are traditionally thought of as aiming to describe a special kind of modal fact or property, or perhaps facts about other possible worlds. But that assumption leads to difficult ontological, epistemological, and methodological puzzles. Should we accept that there are modal facts or properties, or other possible worlds? If so, what could these things be? How could we come to know what the modal facts or properties are? How can we resolve philosophical debates about what is necessary or possible? The normativist rejects the assumption that modal claims aim to describe modal features or possible worlds, arguing instead that they serve as useful ways of conveying, reasoning with, and renegotiating semantic rules and their consequences. By dropping the descriptivist assumption, the normativist is able to unravel the notorious ontological problems of modality, and provide a clear and plausible story about how we can come to know what is metaphysically necessary or possible. Most importantly, this approach helps demystify philosophical methodology. For we are able to see that resolving metaphysical modal questions does not require a special form of philosophical insight or intuition. Instead, it requires nothing more mysterious than empirical knowledge, conceptual mastery, and an ability to explicitly convey and renegotiate semantic rules.