What Do We Talk about When We Talk about Metaphysical Modality?

Abstract One thing that makes metaphysics both interesting and difficult is its half-way status between the questions of everyday life and those of formal disciplines. In approaching any given topic, we may take as our starting point either the everyday concerns or the formal issues, and in theorizing come to successively accommodate the other side. Using metaphysical modality as a case study, this chapter aims to show that it matters what we take as our starting point. Prior to debating the nature and extent of metaphysical modality, philosophers need to have a grasp on the phenomenon that they are debating. Such a prior grasp (the answer to what Gideon Rosen has called the ‘neophyte’s question’) can proceed in two general ways. Top-down approaches begin with modality where we seem to have the firmest theoretical grip on it: in logic, either the logic of modality or logical modality itself. Bottom-up approaches begin with modality as we encounter it in ordinary life, what modal semanticists have called ‘circumstantial’ modality. Which approach we take matters; different approaches lead to different desiderata on our theories, different conditions for what counts as a counterexample, different features considered to be non-negotiable and different rules for what should lead us to change our theory.