Low-Grade Two-Dimensionalism

1. Two-dimensionalists often rely on the assumption that “a posteriori information only tells us about our world” (Chalmers (1996), 137). This assumption backs their rejection of what Chalmers calls “strong metaphysical necessities”, since such necessities would be forever beyond our epistemic reach. But I see no reason to accept this epistemological constraint, and much reason to reject it. Not only are there, as Soames notes1, cases in which non-modal a posteriori knowledge combines with conditional a priori modal knowledge to yield, a posteriori, previously-unavailable categorical modal knowledge, but it seems to me that there are numerous cases in which ordinary epistemic procedures straightforwardly deliver modal information. Examining a table can reveal nonmodal properties such as its shape and material composition, modally-inflected dispositional properties, and fully modal properties such as the facts that it could be taken through that doorway, that it wouldn’t break if a book were placed on it, or that it could have been painted red. I find plausible the stronger view that in many cases, this modal information is part of the content of perceptual states – an essential aspect of a perceptual space seems to me to be the presentation of the possibility of acts and events at locations – but the weaker claim that some stage of the epistemic process yields novel modal information suffices to reject this aspect of two-dimensionalism.