Modalities in Representation

Now that I have a personal space on my institution's website, I decided to migrate this blog in order to have more control and independence. I also decided to unify all my research blogs. Here is the link to this new blog : Possible Situations Blog Therefore, this space will not be updated anymore, but I'll leave it as it is until Blogger reclaims it.

The thrust of the previous post is that there are two main levels of analysis when discussing representation in science: relevance and accuracy, or what a representation is about and what it says. Let us focus first on conditions of relevance. Consider any model M , and any object O . The question I want to ask is: in what sense might we say that it is possible that M represents O , or that it must be so (independently of whether it represents it well )? We should first dispell an ambiguity in this question. Are we talking in general, or in a particular context? I have argued in my past research ( Ruyant 2021 ) that there is an important difference between two senses of “represent”: either it refers to norms at play in the epistemic community (such as: the Lotka-Volterra model represents a prey-predator system), or it refers to a specific use in context (the model of the pendulum that I’m using represents the oscillation of my clock). However, the first sense is generally more...

Now that we have reached a rough taxonomy of modalities, let us talk about representation. I think it will be enough to have this rough picture in mind, which, I reckon, should be uncontroversial aspects of representation: Inferentialism: An epistemic representation (such as a scientific model, a map, a realistic drawing) can be used to make inferences about target systems of a relevant kind in concrete situations. Misrepresentation: It is possible, for a representation, to represent its target inaccurately. I take inferentialism to be a minimalist theory of representation. This does not tell against theories that attempt to give more substance to representation, but only defines a common ground. As for the possibility of misrepresentation, it has been challenged notably on the ground that representation would be a “success term” or a thick term ( Poznic 2018 ; Chakravartty 2010, pp. 209–10 ), but I’m utterly unconvinced that this is the case. “Cruel” is a thick term, and...

Let us say a bit more about a puzzle that came about in previous posts. Let p be "the sum of the angles of a triangle is lower than 180 degrees" and C a modal operator "it is conceivable that". Consider the situation before anyone even conceived of non-euclidean geometries as a consistent alternative to euclidean geometry. Then, intuitively speaking, p was not conceivable (¬Cp). But we now know that p is true of some triangles, because the geometry of the universe is non-euclidean (p). On the other hand, it is quite natural to think that conceptual modality is factive, that is, that if something stems from conceptual necessity, then it is also true (¬C¬p→p), and this implies the converse, that if something is true, then it is conceivable (p→Cp). But these three premises are mutually inconsistent, hence our trilemma: one of the following statements must be false. ¬Cp p p→Cp So, we have exactly three options: (A) either we can claim that p always was...

We have explored so far, in the previous posts, the differences between conceptual, epistemic, metaphysical and natural modalities, arguing that the two first have representational targets, but differ by the mind-dependence of their source, and that the two last have worldly targets. An important common characteristic of all these modalities is factivity: if P is necessary, in any sense of the term, then P is the case. The converse of this theorem of alethic modal logic is that if P is the case, then P is also possible, that is, compatible with the source of necessity. This is notably not the case of deontic and practical modalities: maybe it must be the case that no one walks on the grass according to the norms, but someone is doing it right now, or maybe we must stop the water from flowing into our basement, but we are not actually doing it. Deontic laws, contrarily to natural ones, can be broken. Another way of making the difference is in terms of direction of fit. If someone w...

As we have seen in the previous post, we can make sense of the division between subjective and objective modalities in terms of whether they concern worldly objects, or rather our attitudes towards them. The target of necessary constraints (whether they are worldly or representational) matters, not the source of necessity. But what about the finer distinctions: what distinguishes between epistemic and conceptual possibility? And what distinguishes metaphysical and natural necessity? Consider epistemic and conceptual possibilities first. An hypothesis that flows naturally from our previous remarks is that the target of necessity is representational in both cases, but the source of necessity is markedly different in each case. With conceptual and logical necessity, the source of necessity, the origin of the constraint, lies in our representational capacities, in us, while with epistemic necessity, it lies in the external world. This means reintroducing an analytic/synthetic distinctio...

Remember our list of kinds of modalities from the previous post: Logico-conceptual (Bachelor cannot be married) Epistemic (she might be at home) Metaphysical (water molecules are of the H2O kind) Natural (heavy objects must fall) Deontic (she must work tonight) Practical (we could use wood to build this plane) The two first modalities above, epistemic and logico-conceptual, are often thought to be mind-dependent or subjective, while the two next ones, metaphysical and natural, are mind-independent or objective (as for the two last ones, let us put them aside for now). Objective modalities are often used in order to analyse explanations or causation. These are the ones typically involved in counterfactual talk (if you had got up earlier, you woudn't have missed your train), although sometimes conceptual necessities are thus expressed as well (if he were a bachelor, he wouldn't be married). The distinction between objective and subjective modalities could be understood as...