Non-modal Metametaphysics

Skeptical challenges can give principled reasons to prefer one such approach to metaphysics as opposed to another. Jonathan Schaffer, for example, argues that the triviality of responses to existence questions gives us reason to accept a conception of metaphysical reflection as aiming to provide accounts of the grounding or dependence relations that undergird what is fundamental. It is not difficult to see that there are or exist numbers between 5 and 10 and, thus, that there are numbers. What is difficult is saying whether numbers are fundamental entities, e.g., grounded in some extra-mental structure of reality, or merely conventional. In this paper, I will argue that approaches to metaphysics which center on modal intuitions open themselves up to unnecessary skeptical challenges. EJ Lowe and Tuomas Tahko are exemplars by which I will illustrate this problem. Lowe and Tahko take a core element of metaphysics to rest upon knowledge of possible essences, which allows us to reflect upon possible beings and their kinds. While skepticism about modal knowledge might be a kind of global skepticism, these claims about metaphysics resting on modal knowledge are dialectically ineffective with scientific anti-realists of various stripes, and skeptics might justifiably appeal to such anti-realism to question whether claims about modality constitute knowledge or are a substantive kind of knowledge. By contrast, I propose that assumptions about modal intuitions are not as necessary for metaphysics as Lowe, Tahko, and their skeptical interlocutors believe. Instead, metaphysics can be much more ably defended against skeptical challenges if it consists primarily in knowledge of what is actual, rather than knowledge of what is possible. I conclude by showing that, if we modify their account of metametaphysics to center on non-modal notions, including a non-modal account of essence, many of those challenges can be avoided.