In orthodox Hinduism, the dichotomy between theory and praxis, or knowledge and the thing done by the knowledgeable, is traced back to Upavarsha, the chief commentator on the Brahma Sutra. This does not mean that there is a necessary or real distinction between 'karma-kanda' (ritual or other knowledge based actions) and 'jnana-kanda' (corpus of relevant knowledge). Indeed, making the distinction might be useless or mischievous. Why? One answer is that knowledge is essentially 'ontologically dysphoric'- it is not at home in the world. It adds imaginary attributes or subtracts real attributes because of its own restlessness or lack of rootedness in the realm of existence. It is itself 'Avidya' (ignorance) till it is realized that 'Vidya' is a path out of this world, where it can't be at home, because the proper end of the Knower is Liberation from the delusion that Knowledge can itself be pure, permanent, sufficient unto itself and complete. Accepting this is the case releases us from the obligation to make impossible demands of the Universe or to torture ourselves by feelings of inferiority or frustration.
To see how this may happen, consider the two pictures shown below-
Picture A
A person knowledgeable about contemporary culture, would say (A) is Beyonce- or some one dressed up to look like her. 'B' is a fat, elderly, Indian man- like me. I may feel deeply aggrieved with a type of knowledge which denies that I look like (A) rather than (B). Can Philosophy come to my rescue?
Perhaps, if knowledge is something separable from the actions of the knowledgeable, then, by appealing to modal epistemology, we may be able to show that (B) is a better representation of Beyonce because it is a necessary truth that cisgender people can't be attractive (and Beyonce can't help but be attractive). If you fail to see this you are a Nazi or a TERF or a Trump supporter. That is a sufficient condition for your being wrong about everything. But if you are wrong about (A), you may also be wrong that my attributes are more like those of (B) than (A).
You may feel that the claim I am making is not plausible. Why on earth would the Academy give space to things like Modal Epistemology if the thing is useless at best and, at worst, highly mischievous? The answer, I'm afraid, is that some branches of Academia have become adversely selective of imbecility and are on the verge of turning into Grievance Studies ghettoes.
The fact is, since we currently have no plausible 'Theory of Everything', whatever the Truth might be, it is implausible relative to our current state of Knowledge or what we consider epistemologically plausible. This, I suppose, is a version of the Benacerraf problem for modality which turns on the connection between knowing, which is nominal or intensional, and what is known, which is real or extensional. The gap between the two proves fertile ground for cascading 'intensional fallacies'.
The fact is, whereas we may be able to use a logical calculus well enough where extensions are well-defined, it is futile to do so where intensions are impredicative, epistemic or otherwise ambiguous.
Our semantics change when extensions change as particular intensions- i.e. things we can name like Justice or Beauty but which aren't 'objective' or well defined- are inquired into. Indeed, epistemology itself changes as knowledge is pursued. But the object of knowledge may remain the same.
Knowledge is an inquiry process and, as it is pursued, what is plausible for an account of it own working is not plausible as an account of what it aims at. In particular, inquiry is constrained in ways which Truth is not. Think of it like a Detective who has to find admissible evidence to convict a killer. It is not enough for him to put himself in the shoes of the culprit and give an account of how the crime came about. He has to proceed according to rigid protocols. His final account may be 'gappy' or 'glutty' with respect to the truth of the matter but so long as it secures the conviction of the killer, he has done a good enough job.
I suppose, one could say there is no Benacerraf problem for Platonism that isn't also a problem for his having a problem with Platonism. After all, a particular person can't not 'participate' in a Platonic form related to whatever Platonic form he wishes it to be. That form may be problematic. However, we don't know if any one else can have the same form or even if he himself truly had it or has it still. The problem with a methodological doubt, which applies to itself, is that it is (or ought to be) estopped from urging itself.
Peacocke’s 'integration challenge'- which can be seen as a generalization of Benacerraf’s problem- is to reconcile “a plausible account of what is involved in the truth of statements of a given kind with a credible account of how we can know those statements, when we do know them”. Thus, a prosecutor has to find a way of making his case credible- beyond a reasonable doubt- to a jury. The detective may have, by purely admissible means, assembled clinching evidence. The defendant may himself have confessed to the detective. But, a Jury might not be able to follow the detective's logic. They may be distracted by some extraneous consideration- the defendant is handsome or is a celebrated athlete. They may be swayed by the rhetoric of the defence counsel. There is many a fall between the cup of establishing means, motive and opportunity and the lip of convicting the murderer. But this is also true in non juristic fields.
Field's 'improvement' on Benacerraf involved formulating the problem in such a way that it did not depend on a causal theory of knowledge and thus made no assumption about necessary and sufficient conditions for knowledge. Instead, it depends on the idea that we should view with suspicion any claim to know facts about a certain domain if we believe it impossible in principle to explain the reliability of our beliefs about that domain.' The problem here is that we are not interested in principals. We are interested in practice. A principle is merely a heuristic associated with a useful practice. True, it may be otiose or involve systematic bias. But we have no difficulty in refining our principles- or pretending someone else is doing so for us.
The Stanford Encyclopaedia of philosophy directs our attention to a recent refinement given by Anand Vaidya & Wallner to the general question of modal epistemology which isGeneral question: How can we come to know, or be justified in believing, what is necessary, possible, contingent, essential, and accidental?
This begs the question of whether there is something real which is known. It may be that there is nothing but actions and attributing knowledge, or utility, or moral value to an action is merely an action of a particular type. Justification is merely a function of Justiciability which may be protocol bound for a particular purpose. It may not be something real in itself.
Recently, Vaidya and Wallner (2021) have further refined the General question by splitting it into two different questions:
Access question: How can we epistemically access the modal realm?
Is the modal realm a mere metaphor or is it something real? Are we not making a mistake in taking a metaphor to be reality and then erecting another metaphor, itself to be taken as real, upon what is merely a manner of speaking? I may say 'I feel blue'- i.e. I am depressed. It would be very strange if you said to me 'mix some yellow with your blue so that you start to feel green'. To say you are blue is merely a manner of speaking. There is no actual colour associated with your condition.
If there is a 'modal realm' which is like the realm of the King of Sweden, we may speak of how to gain access to it- e.g. by booking a flight to Stockholm. But if the 'modal realm' is merely a metaphor, then it is not something we can get access to or navigate within. It is a different matter that we can speak of a mathematical 'configuration space' or a hypothetical 'fifth dimension' containing all possible worlds. It may be that for Physics, such things are useful because objective reality can be well enough defined. But when it comes to the mind, where 'intensions' seldom have objective or even non-arbitrary extensions, it is questionable whether such is the case.
Navigation question: How should we navigate from one kind of modality to another?
The problem here is that some may see a 'modality' in one way- e.g. it is necessary- whereas others may see it in another way- the thing is incompossible and does not exist. The realm of the King of Sweden is different from the realm of the King of England. This is an objective fact encoded in International Law. But the realm of 'Christendom' is not well defined. I may say both Sweden and England are part of Christendom. You may say 'No! Protestant countries aren't Christian at all! Moreover, Capitalism is incompatible with Christendom. Not till Capitalism is abolished can England be said to be within the Christian realm'.
The Access question investigates how we initially gain epistemic access to modal propositions...
We gain access to propositions when we hear them or read them or formulate them for ourselves. Some propositions may be classed as modal. But this classification is arbitrary or essentially contested.
The Navigation question presupposes that we have some modal knowledge, and then investigates how we can move from one kind of modality to another, such as, e.g., from conceptual to metaphysical modality.Conceptual necessity arises from the meaning of terms and concepts, while metaphysical necessity concerns the way the world is or could be, independent of our concepts or language. The problem here is that ours might be an 'anthropic' universe- i.e. one with particular 'accidents' such that we have evolved in the way we have done. We may not be able to conceive of any essential feature of our own Universe because it subsists in an inconceivable 'possible world'. Metaphysical necessity generally refers to things being true in every possible world, whereas conceptual necessity is true by definition. Sadly, as we have seen, it is conceivable that every conceptual necessity is not essential. It is merely conventional. This means claims about Metaphysical essences can't be anchored in, or rendered equivalent to, conventional claims or conceptions of necessity.
In other words, it asks how we come to know that some proposition pp is, say, metaphysically necessary,
The problem here is Knightian Uncertainty. We don't know all possible states of the world. What appears metaphysically necessary today may be found to contradict facts about the world tomorrow.
given that we already know that pp is, say, conceptually necessary.
We say 'The Sun rises and sets'. For a long time, people thought this meant it must be the case that the Sun circles the Earth rather than the other way around. Otherwise our concept of Sunrise and Sunset was ab ovo flawed. The fact is, metaphysics was misleading while conceptualism has tended to be anti-realist about abstract objects. But, since we know little about the mind- it appears it may be far more plastic than we can envisage- there is little we can say about what will be conceptually necessary in the future even for ourselves and with respect to particular conventions (which are solutions to coordination games) like the Law.
While the Navigation question focuses on how we can have a certain kind of modal knowledge given that we already have another kind of modal knowledge,
e.g. treating light as a particle even though we know it is a wave. The answer is that no navigation is necessary. It is useful to treat light in one way for one purpose and to treat it in a different way for another purpose. Who knows how future scientists will conceive it?
the Access question targets the issue of how we can have modal knowledge in the first place.
We have hypotheses and can verify if they are useful for a particular purpose. But this is an activity of our own. It is not the case that we are accessing or exiting some pre-existing realm.
Can an activity have an essence? Consider breathing. That is an activity. Surely it has an essence such that respiration remains the same in all possible worlds? Sadly, it turns out that there are two types of respiration- aerobic and anaerobic. It may be that other forms will be discovered on other planets.
Some thirty years ago, Kit Fine, from a neo-Aristotelian point of view, introduced a new conception of essence
Finean Essentialism ((FE)states that Metaphysically necessities are true in virtue of (or: are grounded in) essentialist truths.
Sadly, such truths are inaccessible. Contingent truths are accessible to some useful end. But Essential truths are not knowable because we can't conceive of all possible worlds. It must be said that Fine makes the following caveat- the fact that essences metaphysically ground modality, by no means entails that knowledge of modality must proceed via knowledge of essence. Otherwise put, metaphysical priority doesn’t require epistemic priority. Nonetheless, on the basis of (FE) essentialists identify knowledge of essence as one chief pathway to modal knowledge.
In other words, a knowledge inaccessible to us is a pathway to a useful enough type of knowledge which we use in our daily lives. I know it is impossible that a fat, elderly, man like me is actually the super-star Beyonce. This is because, whenever I make this claim, people laugh at me or suggest that I see a shrink. Thus, I accept that it is impossible that I am Beyonce. I suppose you could claim that I have some God given knowledge of the essence of Beyonce and this is why I accept the impossibility of my being her. But this is merely a claim. It can't be verified. Still, if I knew the essence of Beyonce- i.e. the 'real definition' of her- maybe I could teach beautiful and talented young girls how to better impersonate Beyonce. Sadly, such is not the case.
I suppose a 'real definition' is the extension Omniscient God would give to an 'intension'. I suppose God could perform a miracle such that I turn into an exact replica of Beyonce. Indeed, we might say 'the only reason the world contains non-Beyonces is because God is too niggardly to turn everyone into a Beyonce.' This expresses our ontological dysphoria- our dissatisfaction with the world- but offers us no pathway out of our feeling of frustration and 'not being at home' in a cruel world.
Consider E.J. Lowe's claim that
Knowing an entity’s essence is simply knowing what that entity is.
We know some of the predicates of an entity but not all of them. If we knew the essence of that entity, we would know what predicates could be taken away or added to it without significantly changing it. I know Beyonce is a great singer, dancer and actress. Could she also be a great Senator, Governor or future POTUS? I'd like to think so. Someone who knows her better might disagree. Beyonce lives for her art. She dislikes contemporary politics which many consider corrupt and out of touch with the concerns of ordinary people. It is precisely the qualities which make her a great artiste that disqualify her from a career in politics.
And at least in the case of some entities, we must be able to know what they are, because otherwise it would be hard to see how we could know anything at all about them.
We know some things about particular entities or individuals but may not know what they are. A French diplomat married a beautiful Chinese opera star who had his baby. It turned out that the opera star was actually a man. The suspicion was that the fellow was a spy. But then there have been plenty of senior officials in the British Secret Service who turned out to be Soviet agents. Much was known about them, but not the fact that what they were really doing was working for the Kremlin.
More recently, Mark Jago opines that
Essences are constitutive of material objects.
Whereas we feel we get a notion of essence when we look at what a bunch of material objects have in common. But that notion is an 'intension' whose 'extension' is unknown. I recall getting upset when I found out that my mother was going to return to work. Back then (the early Sixties) in Madras, Mums stayed at home. Would Mummy cease to be Mummyish if she had a job? My mother understood my fear. She took me with her to visit other working Mums. I saw that Mums remain Mums even if they have jobs. Now, of course, it is taken for granted that women will continue their careers after having a baby. Whatever is the essence of Mummyishness, it has nothing to do with having to stay at home all day.
Located properties “bundle” together to form a material object;
The truth is we attribute properties to material objects and then discover they lack some of those properties while possessing others of which we were unaware.
and each property in the bundle is essential to the material object thereby constituted.
What we are discovering is that things we thought were essential to a process aren't necessarily so. This is the magical aspect of 'fuzzy logic' whereby the system remains robust even if some rules or elements are removed.
Each material object is numerically identical to a located bundle of its essential properties.
Even if this is the case, there is the problem of impredicativity. The essential properties of one object may be defined in terms of other objects and vice versa. This problem of interdependence may be solved 'at the end of mathematical time' but, till then, extensions won't be well defined. For practical purposes, what we have may be good enough. But practical purposes change over time. Things which we dismiss as outliers or of only theoretical interest, may become very important for technological innovation at a later point.
The late Anand Vaidya, who had a strong interest in Hindu philosophy- where a debate raged between those who consider all conceptual knowledge to be delusional and those who maintained that attributes had a real existence- was developing a more subtle essentialist theory when, very sadly, his life was cut short.
Vaidya has proposed an account of our knowledge of essence that is influenced by Husserl’s method of eidetic variation, according to which we get access to the essence of an object by varying its features in imagination.
Husserl emphasized his system's reliance upon a foundational 'transcendental ego'- which is like the Hindu 'Atman' or 'self'- as the unifying principle of all consciousness and the source of all knowledge. It's not an empirical self or a psychological entity, but rather the active, synthesizing consciousness that gives meaning and unity to our experience. It's the "I think" that underlies all thought and experience.
The question is whether this transcendental ego is detached from or is inseparable with the reality it reflects on. Perhaps, if Vaidya had lived he would have thrown light upon the differences between various Vedantic schools of thought in this matter. In particular is that of which knowledge is sought 'Nirguna' or 'Saguna'. Does it have attributes or is it beyond any such things?
If a feature is seen to be invariant, then it is an essence.
It is only seen as such. It may be no such thing.
In contrast to other essentialists discussed here, Vaidya explicitly targets understanding and not knowledge of essence. (Following Kvanvig 2009, Vaidya takes understanding [but not knowledge] to be compatible with epistemic luck.)
This seems reasonable. We can understand imaginary creatures- e.g. unicorns- though we know they don't exist.
Adi Sankara says- “Brahma satya jagat mithya, jivo brahmaiva naparah”. It means Brahman (name of the Ultimate Reality) is the only truth, the world is illusory, and there is ultimately no difference between the individual Self and the Brahman. Mithya means neither true nor false. Our understanding has this quality. It is useful enough for the moment, but it isn't the final word, so to speak.
Taking Husserl’s ideas only as a point of departure, Vaidya holds that we can gain understanding of the essence of some object xx by varying properties of xx in our imagination.
But what we are understanding is fictional or neither true nor false. It is speculative. I imagine a fight between Spiderman and Count Dracula. The problem is that Wentworth- who eats bugs- might intervene. How will Spidey save himself?
Of those properties that are invariant over the multiplicity of variations, we judge that they are essential to xx.
Michels has pointed out that even if we achieve this 'objectual understanding', we don't know for sure that we have done so. Moreover, our minds aren't transparent to ourselves- we don't know what distortions we are systematically or accidentally introducing. One problem with the view that grasping a doctrine will have the same effect on all who do so- e.g. grasping Christian theology will turn anyone who does so into a believing Christian- is that it may be that only those with a particular constitution can grasp the doctrine in question. But, it may be, they would come to it by some other means than indoctrination. Faith may be the gratuitous gift of God and achievable in no other way. But the same may be said of grasping any particular theory or practice. I doubt I would understand computers even if I studied the subject in College. I know there are plenty of people who taught themselves how to use computers and who can do very innovative things with them.
As a normative inquiry, the epistemology of modality is
anything goes. The proper representation of Beyonce is as a fat, elderly, Indian man. If you think otherwise you are a Fascist TERF.
centrally concerned with what Vaidya and Wallner (2021) call the Problem of Modal Epistemic Friction (PMEF). This problem concerns the normative restrictions on candidate capacities or methods.
In other words, bigotry of one type or another.
Take, e.g., imagination as a candidate mental capacity in our pursuit for modal knowledge. In order for us to be properly guided to modal knowledge, we cannot apply imagination in a completely unrestricted manner.
Einstein was wrong to imagine what a person travelling at the speed of light would see. It is well known that humans can't achieve such high velocity because the acceleration needed to do so would have to last much longer than our highest possible life span.
If no restrictions would apply, we could imagine all sorts of impossible things like water without hydrogen, transparent iron etc.
Nothing wrong with imagining such things. Indeed, a Chemistry teacher might ask his students to do so. Could Helium replace Hydrogen? No. Helium is inert. What about Tritium? Tritiated water does exist. But Tritium is an isotope of Hydrogen. As for 'transparent iron'- I suppose scientists might figure out a way to make this appear to be the case using nano-particles.
Hence, some restrictions, or “epistemic friction creators”, as Vaidya and Wallner call them, have to be in place.
In which case, there would be no theology or metaphysics or poetry or tales of wonder. Both artistic and scientific creativity would suffer. What is needed for conceivability is not 'epistemic friction' but an understanding of the terms used in a proposition. We can conceive of 'impossible' or 'incompossible' objects- e.g. mountains that are also birds, till Lord Indra cuts off their wings. What is lacking is plausibility or empirical verification. We have seen mountains and we have seen birds. We haven't seen a bird big enough to be a mountain or a mountain small enough to be a bird.
The PMEF asks what the epistemic friction creators are and how we come to know them or at least how we come to adequately deploy them in our application of various capacities and methods in order to be properly guided to modal knowledge.
I suppose this is a bit like 'cognitive dissonance'. The fear of being 'cancelled' as a Fascist TERF may- it is my pious hope- cause people to think I am Beyonce. After all, it is essential that we stop supporting the notion that gender is 'natural' rather than 'socially constructed'. Moreover, since Beyonce is the definition of female grace and beauty, it is essential that I be seen as Beyonce so as to undermine and subvert Patriarchy and Neoliberalism. Moreover, I must necessarily be Beyonce so as to be seen as essentially Beyonce. As Vaidya & Wallner have argued
' a non-reductive interpretation of Finean Essentialism, (according to which essence entails neccessity) follows from the essence of essences in virtue of the fact that essences have modal bearing.
a 'reductive' approach says I'm not Beyonce because I'm a fat, ugly, talentless man. She is a beautiful, talented, woman. But the essence of essences is that necessity is normative. I should be considered as Beyonce to as to subvert patriarchy and neo-liberalism. Therefore it is necessary that I am Beyonce.
I suppose, if this were an argument for the necessary existence of God- as in Godel's mathematical proof- we might be prepared to entertain it even though it entails 'modal collapse'- i.e. there is only one possible world. But would we do so if it entails treating fat ugly blokes as the divine Queen Bey?
Essences via their modal bearing constrain what is objectively necessary and possible for a given entity.
Which is why essentialism has been associated with bigotry or crazy shit. If even category theoretical 'naturality' is far too seek, essences must remain forever beyond our ken. It is a different matter that, in natural language, we may use words like 'essentially' or 'necessarily' to add imperative force to our utterances. The mistake is to think these are alethic statements.
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