ABSTRACT
The nature of certainty and its relation to necessity, possibility, and inevitability is explored. So too is the relationship between certainty, knowledge, and doubt. The aim is to present a connective analysis of these concepts and to demonstrate the incoherence of many received analyses. Inspired by Alan White’s treatment of the subject, distinctions are drawn between objective and subjective certainty, between possibility of, possibility that, and possibility for; between the actuality of a possibility and the possibility of an actuality; and between the certainty of things, the certainty of states, and the certainty of propositions. It is argued that the commonly acknowledged category of epistemic possibility is a misconception, that it is mistaken to suppose that there are no unknown certainties and that something may be certain without being either necessary or inevitable.
