'De Re Modal Knowledge Empirically Explained', Sonia Roca Royes

ABSTRACT:

The talk will sketch my attempt at explaining de re modal knowledge. As far as concrete beings are concerned, the view is best classified as empiricist. Crudely, I want to say that we know that tables can break because we've seen (similar) tables broken. As one might suspect, this amounts to using a notion (similar to that) of “counterpart relation” and give it an epistemological role (yet without committing myself to analysing modal truth in terms of counterparts, which I would rather not).