I was wondering if anyone here had any recomendations for texts on Modal logic.
I’ve attended a lecture that showed how Krepke addresses Quine’s criticisms of the analytic.
This lecture intrigued me so much, that I’ve gone back to the latter Wittgenstein (which is not an easy task, I assure you) and Quine to fully understand their complaints against foundationalism. I’m still not quite there, but the next step will be a doozy. Understanding enough modal logic to aprehend Krepke seems like quite a task.
Any suggestions would be highly appreciated.
To make this topic more meaningful then a “hey throw a book at me” post, I will try to articulate my (elementary) understanding of the argument to anyone that asks.
Okay, here is the very general direction I’m going…
Quine will extend Wittgenstein’s argument about description vs explination. He points out that we define terms through circular terms.
Ex: The wall is a collection of bricks, and the collection of bricks is the wall
This cuts deep at the foundationalist claims that there is a stopping point of analysis. If we can’t even define our own terms, then we end up sinking into some kind of coherence theory of knowledge (which ultimately reduces to continentalist BS).
As an analytic, I don’t tend to enjoy thinking of myself as a continentalist…
All that is nothing new…
From what I’ve been told, Krepke can respond to this by defining foundational claims in terms of possible worlds. Something that is a foundational claim has to remain true in all possible worlds.
I don’t know how to even go about evaluating that kind of statement. But it intrigues me enough to try to figure it out… After all, what do I have to loose (besides vast amounts of ‘free’ time)?
I don’t even know what exactly is at stake in modal logic. I do know enough to know that its severely more contraversial then formal logic where existential import is about the entirety of all that is fought over.
to defend the foundationalist epistemological claims you might want to check out BonJour (The Structure of Empirical Knowledge) and Klein (Foundationalism and the Infinite Regress of Reasons)…
you may also want to read Haack, her papers on foundherentism may provide the best (or worst) of both worlds… (then again, her position is a blending of the two so you may not like that at all…)
but as you have found, foundational epistemological claims, even in all possible worlds (which are in and of themselves nothing but additional layers of the language game -each leading to its own infinite regress or circle) will always be jubject to the skeptic’s charges…