Use this URL to cite or link to this record in EThOS: https://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.640794
Title: Knowledge of modality by imagining
Author: Strohminger, Margot
ISNI:       0000 0004 5348 1442
Awarding Body: University of St Andrews
Current Institution: University of St Andrews
Date of Award: 2014
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Abstract:
Assertions about metaphysical modality (hereafter modality) play central roles in philosophical theorizing. For example, when philosophers propose hypothetical counterexamples, they often are making a claim to the effect that some state of affairs is possible. Getting the epistemology of modality right is thus important. Debates have been preoccupied with assessing whether imaginability—or conceivability, insofar as it's different—is a guide to possibility, or whether it is rather intuitions of possibility—and modal intuitions more generally—that are evidence for possibility (modal) claims. The dissertation argues that the imagination plays a subtler role than the first view recognizes, and a more central one than the second view does. In particular, it defends an epistemology of metaphysical modality on which someone can acquire modal knowledge in virtue of having performed certain complex imaginative exercises.
Supervisor: Brown, Jessica Anne Sponsor: Not available
Qualification Name: Thesis (Ph.D.) Qualification Level: Doctoral
EThOS ID: uk.bl.ethos.640794  DOI: Not available
Keywords: Conceivability ; Imagination ; Metaphysical modality ; Intuition ; Thought experiments ; Epistemology of modality
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