Constructing modal knowers: from agentive to objective modality

Barbara Vetter (Freie Universität Berlin)

Agentive modal knowledge is knowledge of agentive modality: what agents are able to do and what their environment affords to them. It is crucial to human agency and must be easy to acquire. There is thus good reason to believe that it is a relatively basic form of human knowledge. Yet modal epistemology has almost ignored agentive modal knowledge, making it at best an afterthought or an application of a more general cognitive mechanism. In this talk, I propose a modal epistemology that takes the opposite direction: starting with agentive modal knowledge and constructing more general forms of modal knowledge (in particular, knowledge of objective modality) from it. In doing so, I draw on literature about causal cognition as well as an underappreciated tool from Grice called “creature construction”.