ABSTRACT
This chapter presents, in the form of an inconsistent set of three claims, the main challenge in the epistemology of modality. Each of the three main responses to it – Rationalism, Empiricism and Scepticism – can be seen as consisting in denying one of those claims. After this, the chapter focuses on two meta-epistemological distinctions that are becoming more and more central in the literature. The first one classifies the epistemologies of modality on the basis of the amount and nature of the suggested routes to modal knowledge: uniform accounts suggest only one route to modal knowledge whereas non-uniform accounts suggest more than one. The second one classifies epistemologies on the basis of their suggested epistemic priority relations: accounts that deny epistemic priority relations are known in the literature as symmetric accounts. Within the asymmetric ones, necessity-first accounts take (at least some) knowledge of necessity to be prior to any knowledge of possibility, while it’s the other way around for possibility-first accounts. While the primary aim of the chapter is to survey recent literature and identify the directions that current research is taking, it also motivates the need for a non-uniform and symmetric epistemology of modality.
