Barbara Vetter, Freie Universität Berlin
18. März 2020   16:45 – 18:45 Uhr   2i   NIG

– Leider musste dieser Vortrag abgesagt werden –

Poster WKAP-Vortrag Barbara Vetter

An agency-based approach to modal knowledge

Abstract: I provide a novel approach to modal knowledge, which has two features. First, it is agency-based: it locates the roots of our modal thought and knowledge in our experience of our own agency. I argue that simply by being agents in the world, we possess a wealth of modal knowledge, more specifically: knowledge about our own abilities and dispositions as well as the dispositions and affordances of objects around us. Second, the approach is ambitious in that it takes the experience of certain modal properties in agency to be the sole distinctive feature of specifically modal thought and knowledge; everything that we know about modality beyond the experience of agency is a matter of applying standard methods of inquiry such as deduction, induction and abductive methods for choos- ing between theories.