1 Introduction: The integration problem
There are two quite different focal points for the epistemology of modality. The first, perhaps narrower, focus is on the manner in which quite specific modal claims are warranted, if at all. If it is genuinely possible that I might have taken a plane rather than a train from Leeds to Nancy, how do I know this? Do I know it because I can conceive of taking a plane and not the train, because I have a modal intuition that I could have done so, because no contradiction is derivable from the claim that I took a plane rather than a train, or on the basis of principles of understanding that account for my grasp of the claim that I took a plane rather than a train, etc.? This focus clearly makes modal epistemology part of epistemology, as that philosophical specialty is normally understood.
A second focus is on the warrant for a theory of the modal. This is a big picture concern about our knowledge, if any, of the nature of the modal. Whether we say th...
