Precis of Amie L. Thomasson, norms and necessity

Abstract

Claims about what is necessary or possible play a central role in debates in metaphysics and elsewhere in philosophy. But how can we understand such claims, and how can we come to know which are true? Modal discourse has long presented formidable ontological, epistemological, and methodological problems - problems that arise or are exacerbated by assuming that modal talk aims to describe or track special features of this world, or other possible worlds. Norms and Necessity aims to revive a non-descriptivist approach to modality, holding that the function of modal discourse is not to describe or track anything, but rather to convey norms or rules (and what follows from them) in the useful form of indicatives. The book develops this ‘modal normativist’ approach, showing how it avoids the most serious objections that have kept similar approaches off the table for the past several decades (including the Frege-Geach problem, and problems of accounting for de re and a posteriori necessities). It also shows how a careful development of the normativist approach can help avoid or resolve the classic ontological, epistemological, and methodological problems of modality, as part of an overall deflationary approach to metaphysics.