Dear All, This Thursday at the Serious Metaphysics Group, Fredrik Nyseth will be giving a talk titled 'Could the Source of Modality Be Contingent?' (abstract below). We will meet in the philosophy faculty board room from 1:00-2:30.
Hope to see you there, Georgie Could the Source of Modality Be Contingent? In his paper 'Morals and Modals' (1986), Simon Blackburn presents a dilemma, one of whose horns aims to establish that there can be no explanation of necessity in terms of something contingent because such an explanation would undermine the necessity that was supposed to be explained. This is typically taken to constitute a problem for attempts to understand necessity in terms of linguistic conventions, because such conventions are (by definition it might be thought) contingent. I will argue that Blackburn's contingency horn need not trouble the linguistic conventionalist, and I will do so by arguing, first, that the standard formal treatment of this horn using modal logic must be rejected because it begs the question against contingency-based approaches to modality, second, that the interpretation of linguistic conventionalism that underlies this formal treatment is inadequate, and third, that there is a coherent alternative to this interpretation that allows for a contingency-based explanation of modality that does not "undermine" necessity in any troublesome sense. This, moreover, points to a general lesson: we must be careful to distinguish theorising about modality from ordinary modal claims -- Georgie Statham PhD Candidate Faculty of Philosophy University of Cambridge _____________________________________________________ To unsubscribe from the CamPhilEvents mailing list, or change your membership options, please visit the list information page: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEvents List archive: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEventsArchive Please note that CamPhilEvents doesn't accept email attachments. See the list information page for further details and suggested alternatives.
