ABSTRACT

There is a good case to be made for the idea that explanations delimit or ‘narrow down’ a certain range of possibilities, if the concepts of possibility and the narrowing down or reducing of possibilities are understood in a way that differs from the standard candidates for them that can be found in the literature. So the task, as I see it, is to make the case for these new types of possibilities,1 and to describe the special way that sets of possibilities get narrowed down by laws and explanations. These possibilities (let’s call them natural possibilities) might easily be dismissed as no possibilities at all, but merely a case of speaking with the vulgar. Nevertheless, there is, I think, good reason to take these examples as seriously modal. Indeed, they represent a kind of modality that opens the way to a new account of the way in which scientifi c explanations and laws are related to possibilities.