possibly maybe

Further support for the Little Leeway Thesis , this time from French and McKenzie's 2012 paper, "Thinking Outside the Toolbox" : "It is indisputably essential to Lewis’ reductive ambitions in general that all the perfectly natural properties are intrinsic, for otherwise they cannot be subject to the ‘principle of free recombination’ that lies at the heart of his modal system. Furthermore, the inclusion of the predicate of ‘perfectly natural’ as an ideological primitive is motivated by the theoretical benefits of doing so; since it is the suitability of these properties to analyze duplication that grounds the majority of these benefits, and since their ability to analyze duplication requires that they be intrinsic, unless these properties are intrinsic then the motivation for including this primitive is seriously undercut. Now, for Lewis (as for others) a property is intrinsic only if it could be had by a lone object (which of course is to say in the Lewisian framewor...

Much recent work in the epistemology of modality acknowledges the challenge of Peter van Inwagen's mitigated modal skepticism, especially as presented in his celebrated 1998  Phil. Studies paper, "Modal Epistemology". Furthermore, many have attempted to grapple with van Inwagen's arguments in that paper. Despite this, not many note van Inwagen's not-infrequent reference to John Seddon's 1972 Mind paper, "Logical Possibility" as an important source of his skepticism about modal claims remote from ordinary experience.  This is significant, since (i) a common criticism is that van Inwagen's mitigated modal skepticism isn't sufficiently warranted, since he fails to motivate a presumption against modal claims remote from ordinary experience, and (ii) van Inwagen alludes to the arguments in Seddon's paper as a core basis for such a presumption. The aim of this post is thus to exposit the main points of Seddon's paper. The hope is that it ...