Fine's response To Vetter and Why It Matters To Philosophy of Education: A Note on Metphysics, Logic and Epistemology in Philosophy of Education (9)

Fine agrees that the relation between ordinary modality and the special modalities is a neglected problem. He also agrees that the problem has to be handled with much greater formal and conceptual care than essentialists have usually shown. But once he starts reconstructing the issue, he subtly shifts the terrain in three major ways. He changes, first, what exactly is being related to what. He changes, second, the form that the relation should take. And he changes, third, what sort of explanation we should expect from the connection between ordinary and metaphysical necessity. Once those shifts are made, the educational discussion we have been developing also has to be reworked.

The first shift concerns the very object of analysis. Vetter had spoken fairly flexibly of ordinary modality and ordinary necessities, and had contrasted them with metaphysical necessity. Fine thinks this is too loose unless we distinguish more sharply between ordinary modal sentences and the ordinary modal propositions they may express. That sounds like a technical clarification, but it matters because it prevents us from moving too quickly from surface grammar to metaphysical conclusions. I'm prone to that temptation all the time, and it happens a lot in philosophy of education. 

Ordinary modal language is often not in the neat sentential form familiar from formal modality. “Mary had to sneeze,” “I can ride a bicycle,” “it is necessary for the journey to take at least ten hours,” these do not obviously map straight onto a simple modal operator applied to a proposition. Fine therefore insists that one must first isolate the class of ordinary modal sentences that can be put into a shape suitable for comparison with special modalities. Only then can one ask what proposition they express in context.

Much of educational modality is also expressed in grammatically untidy ways. Teachers say that a pupil “can reason abstractly now,” that a class “has to settle first,” that a lesson “cannot move on yet,” that a curriculum “must begin with foundations,” that a school “could not cope with that reform.” These are ordinary modal sentences, but they are not all transparently of the clean form “necessarily p” or “possibly p.” Fine’s caution tells us that if we want to use these claims in educational ontology or metaphysics, we cannot simply read them off at face value. We have to ask what ordinary modal proposition is being expressed, under what standards of relevance, and with what background structuring. This already refines our earlier discussion, because it reminds us that educational modal language itself needs formal discipline before it can support larger metaphysical claims about what is possible, necessary, or incompossible in educational life. So we have to get disciplined!

The second shift concerns the relation between ordinary and special modality. Vetter’s main target had been the relativisation strategy, according to which ordinary necessity is understood in terms of special necessity plus relevant conditions. Fine thinks she has identified a genuine issue, but he does not accept that the problem forces a “head turning” reversal in which metaphysical necessity is defined as a species of ordinary necessity. Instead, he tries to preserve a modified form of the relativisation idea, though in a more precise and less ambitious way. His thought is that, given an ordinary modal sentence in a context, what it expresses is roughly the proposition that there are relevant conditions R such that R obtains and, given the special modality appropriate to that context, necessarily if R then p. This means that ordinary modal truths can still be linked to special modal truths, not by being reducible to them in a simple definitional biconditional, but by being partly grounded in them.

This is an important modification. Fine accepts Vetter’s central point that many ordinary necessities will not have an exclusively essentialist source. He does not resist that. He is quite prepared to admit that ordinary necessities often involve nomological, dispositional, or other modal sources that are not purely essentialist. But he denies that this forces us to redefine metaphysical necessity as just one species of ordinary necessity. Why should we need that further step, he asks, if the relativised analysis already gives us a perfectly good connection between the two. In other words, he weakens the demand. The job is not to reduce one to the other in a clean and total way. The job is to explain how ordinary modal truths may be connected to special modal truths under contextually relevant conditions.

That move has immediate educational consequences. Earlier, following Vetter, we started to treat educational practice as a domain in which ordinary modality might be the more familiar and inclusive field, and metaphysical necessity as a more specialised and harder species within it. Fine’s response tells us not to move too quickly in that direction. We may not need a full reversal. It may be enough, and philosophically more accurate, to say that ordinary educational modal truths are often partly grounded in more specialised modal truths, developmental, disciplinary, nomological, perhaps occasionally essentialist, without thereby making metaphysical necessity simply a sub-kind of the ordinary. This preserves a layered picture while avoiding the stronger and more revisionary thesis that educational metaphysics must begin from ordinary modality as its master concept.

The third and perhaps deepest shift concerns explanatory ambition. Vetter had argued that if essences do not play an interesting explanatory role in ordinary objective necessity, then we need another way of connecting ordinary and metaphysical necessity. Fine’s response is, in effect, why think we need more than the connection already available. Once we stop assuming that the relation must be one of reduction or strict definition, the pressure relaxes. A proposition expressed by an ordinary modal sentence may be true because there are relevant conditions and a suitable special necessity linking those conditions to the proposition in question. Some of those special necessities may be metaphysical, some nomological, some perhaps logical. Essences may play a role in some ordinary necessities but not in all. That is not a failure of essentialism. It just shows that ordinary modality is heterogeneous.

This is a subtle but important correction to our earlier educational use of Vetter. We had begun to treat the difference between ordinary and metaphysical modality as potentially quite sharp, with the former governing practical and contextual educational life, and the latter governing the deeper essences of education, teaching, learning, authority, and so on. Fine’s reply suggests a more distributed picture. Educational ordinary modal truths may be grounded in a range of special modalities. A claim such as “this class cannot yet sustain seminar-style discussion” may depend on developmental, social, and institutional conditions; “this curriculum must build concept Y before concept Z” may depend on disciplinary or structural relations; “this reform could not succeed under current conditions” may depend on institutional and perhaps nomological regularities about organisations. Some educational ordinary necessities may have an essentialist component, but many will not. 

The task is therefore not to divide educational modality into the ordinary and the metaphysical, as if those were the only two levels. Rather, it is to ask what special modality, or modalities, are actually doing the work in a given case. This has a direct effect on the earlier discussion of decolonisation and demasculinisation. Under the Vetter-inspired picture, we were sometimes tempted to think that the strongest claims within these projects would need to be understood as metaphysical necessities grounded in essence, while more practical constraints would belong to ordinary modality. Fine’s response makes that too coarse. Many of the modal constraints internal to these educational projects may not be essentially metaphysical at all. A strong decolonial curriculum may require certain moves because of historical, disciplinary, and institutional realities, not because of the essence of decolonisation alone. A demasculinising pedagogy may exclude certain practices because of social and affective structures, not because its essence metaphysically forbids them. Similarly, anti racist and class-based educational projects may clash, not because their essences strictly contradict one another, but because different special modalities, historical, sociological, institutional, ideological, are at work in the relevant ordinary modal truths. Fine’s reply therefore makes the diagnosis of tension more plural and more exact.

It also changes the discussion of incompossibility. Earlier, especially under the pressure of stronger definitional frameworks, incompossibility threatened to look like a relation between the full realisations of educational projects taken almost as rival goods, where their essences or strongest definitions might structurally exclude one another. Fine’s response does not eliminate that possibility, but it introduces an important intermediate level. Some educational projects may be incompossible, not because their essences are directly incompatible, but because the ordinary modal propositions associated with their realisation are grounded in different special modalities whose joint satisfaction is not possible under relevant conditions. In other words, incompossibility may arise at the level of the structured connection between conditions and modal force, rather than only at the highest level of essence.

This lets us distinguish more carefully between at least three kinds of conflict. First, there are merely circumstantial clashes, where two projects cannot presently be realised together because of time, staffing, institutional pressure, or political constraints. Second, there are structural clashes grounded in special modalities such as disciplinary sequencing, social reproduction, historical dependence, or institutional inertia. Third, there may still be deeper essential clashes, where two projects involve incompatible accounts of educational authority, subjecthood, legitimacy, or explanation. Fine’s response strengthens our ability to separate these rather than folding them all into one undifferentiated notion of impossibility.

Another important alteration concerns contextuality. Fine is particularly insistent that ordinary modal claims are context-sensitive, and that the relevant conditions and even the relevant special modality may vary with context. This is crucial for educational analysis. It means that one should be suspicious of universal educational modal claims stated without context. “This school cannot decolonise the curriculum,” “this subject must be demasculinised,” “race must take precedence over class,” “class must be primary,” all such claims may express different propositions in different contexts because the relevant conditions and the operative modality shift. Fine’s view therefore encourages a more local and formalised educational metaphysics. It does not deny general theory, but it insists that the route from ordinary educational language to metaphysical conclusion must pass through contextual specification.

There is also a further, more subtle, implication. Fine suggests that there is a genuine question about what belongs to the conditions and what belongs to the modality. One might place more content into R, the relevant conditions, and less into the special modality, or vice versa. Under a fine-grained criterion of propositional identity, these are not the same. Educationally, this is extremely fertile. When one says that a classroom cannot sustain a certain kind of discussion, is that because of the conditions, lack of trust, noise, historical antagonism, prior knowledge, or because of a stronger modal structure concerning what is developmentally or socially possible. When one says that anti racist and class-based projects cannot both be realised in a curriculum, is the impossibility due to institutional and political conditions, or is it built into the deeper explanatory structures each project presupposes. Fine’s distinction gives us a way of asking this with greater precision.

This means that the educational discussion becomes both more cautious and more powerful. More cautious, because we can no longer move directly from ordinary modal speech to claims about essence or deepest educational ontology. More powerful, because we now have a richer apparatus for mapping the modal structure of educational life. Ordinary educational modality is not a messy residue to be ignored, nor is it simply the broad genus from which metaphysical necessity is carved out. It is a site where contextually relevant conditions and special modal forces meet. To understand an educational possibility, impossibility, or necessity, one must identify both.

That, in turn, changes how one should answer sceptics of metaphysics in education. The response is no longer simply that educational practice covertly relies on metaphysics. It is that educational practice relies on a structured plurality of modal notions, ordinary, disciplinary, developmental, institutional, historical, sometimes essentialist, and that metaphysical analysis is required to sort out how these are connected. Fine’s reply to Vetter therefore does not make the educational use of metaphysics weaker. It makes it less monolithic and more discriminating. It tells us that the deepest philosophical task is not to force all educational constraints into one modal mould, but to understand how different kinds of necessity and possibility are generated, linked, and sometimes confused in educational discourse.

So the cumulative effect of Fine’s response is to alter the whole discussion in a distinctly Finean direction. We should be less interested in reducing one modality to another, less eager to reverse hierarchies too quickly, more attentive to the propositional content expressed by ordinary modal sentences, more sensitive to contextual standards of relevance, more plural in our account of modal sources, and more exact in distinguishing what belongs to the conditions from what belongs to the modal force. Once that is done, the earlier discussion of decolonisation, demasculinisation and their possible incompossibilities becomes more nuanced. The issue is no longer simply whether these projects are essentially compatible or incompatible. It is also, and often first, what ordinary modal propositions they generate in concrete educational contexts, what special modalities partially ground those propositions, and whether those grounds can be jointly sustained. That is a more complex picture than the one we had before, but it is also a more faithful one.