Anti-Realist Approaches to Modality

In this thesis, I will try to explain the nature of necessity and possibility. According to this explanation, necessity and possibility come from the way we understand the world. We take something to be necessary just in case that it comes from certain principles systematizing the world for us. And we take something to be possible just in case that it is consistent with those principles. I will argue that different senses of necessity and possibility correspond to different kinds of systematizing principles. Another thing that I will do is to explore results from empirical studies on modal language and cognition together with their philosophical implications. One implication, as I will argue, is that modal claims are not describing anything in the world but prescribing intellectual norms on how to think about the world. Another implication is that metaphysical modality cannot be fully explained by how we imagine things or how we use language.