Bibliographic record
Abstract
Contemporary modal metaphysics proceeds against an increasingly complex technical and conceptual backdrop. Intuitive hypotheses of modal metaphysics have become controversial, and have been replaced with complicated and contentious theories in many areas of modal-metaphysical theorizing. That is the case, for example, when it comes to recent thinking concerning the structure and logic of essence, and of metaphysical necessity; the nature of lawhood and the modal status of the laws of nature; the metaphysics of transworld identity and of modal representation de re; and the relation between existence, quantification, and modality. I argue in this dissertation that much of the recent methodological trajectory towards complexity in modal metaphysics has its source in a failure, on the part of contemporary theorists, to properly distinguish between contingency and context dependence. Contingency is a matter of how things go relative to worlds of evaluation that are ‘counterfactual’, from the view of our own actual world. By contrast, the context dependence of modal metaphysics involves the sensitivity of modal-metaphysical questions, and their correct answers, to our capacity as theorists to imaginatively shift the possible world of the context. Such imaginative shifting of the world of context involves the consideration ‘as actual’ of possible worlds other than our own, and the hypothetical supposition of perspectives from which modal metaphysics takes on a different character than it actually has. Failure to appreciate the philosophical significance of context dependence is what explains the increasing technical and conceptual intricacy of contemporary modal metaphysics. Conceiving of the analytical tools of modal metaphysics as contextually-relativized, I show how systematic modal theorizing may be brought more evenly in line with the underlying simplicity of its subject-matter.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.028 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.012 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".