Metaphysical Essays - Reductionism, Laws of Nature, and Modal Semantics

Abstract

An open question in metaphysics is the nature of modal space, the space of possibility that undergirds (at least in the traditional order of analysis) our judgments about counterfactuals, laws of nature, essences, natures, and other modal phenomena. But modal space and modal phenomena have always seemed both metaphysically and epistemologically problematic, motivating the search for a reductive analysis for them. These essays explore a generally modal reductionist position, one that takes all fundamental properties of the world to be categorical and nonmodal. The particular challenges I consider are that of reducing laws of nature in the face of threats of nomic reductionism’s collapse into inductive skepticism, and that of providing an expressivist-inspired semantics for modal discourse that avoids Frege-Geach problems and yet offers a fully reductive analysis of alethic or objective metaphysical modalities.