More Vetter: A Note on Metaphysics, Logic and Epistemology in Philosophy of Education (8)

If we return to looking at what Margaret Vetter does we reopen a question that essentialists have tended to bypass, namely how the austere, object-grounded notion of metaphysical modality relates to the messy, shifting, yet indispensable modal judgements that structure ordinary life. The starting point remains Fine’s reversal, that necessity is not primitive but derivative, that what is necessary is what flows from the essences of things. But Vetter immediately notices that this reversal has largely been developed in a rarefied register. It gives us an account of metaphysical necessity, understood as truth in virtue of the nature of all things, and by duality an account of metaphysical possibility as compatibility with those essences. What it does not obviously give us is an account of the much more familiar modal claims that guide action, planning, regret, and judgement, claims such as that this car can reach a certain speed, that a journey must take a certain amount of time, that a person cannot avoid sneezing in a given moment, or that a vase is more liable to break than a desk.

The central difficulty she isolates is not merely that these ordinary modal claims are more numerous or more varied. It is that they are variable in a way that metaphysical modality is not. They are context-sensitive, time-indexed, and dependent upon changing circumstances. At one moment it is true that I can ride a bicycle, at another it is false because no bicycle is available. At one moment a car cannot reach a certain speed, at another it can, after modification. These are not merely epistemic shifts, they are changes in what is objectively possible or necessary given the situation. Yet they retain the marks of genuine modality. They constrain alternatives, they guide action, they appear firm within a context even if the context itself is unstable. Vetter’s first move is therefore to insist that these are not second-rate or merely linguistic phenomena. They are a form of objective modality, what she calls ordinary modality, and any adequate metaphysical theory of modality ought to say how it relates to the essentialist picture.

She then considers what might seem the most straightforward strategy for the essentialist, which is to treat ordinary modality as metaphysical modality under conditions, that is, to relativise necessity. On this view, to say that it is ordinarily necessary that p is to say that, given certain facts R, it is metaphysically necessary that if R then p. The variability of ordinary modality is then explained by the variability of R. This mirrors familiar semantic accounts in which modal claims are evaluated relative to a modal base, a set of relevant facts that restrict the possibilities under consideration.

At first glance this looks promising, but Vetter shows that it fails in a way that is particularly revealing for essentialism. If R is restricted to non-modal facts, facts about physical constitution, distances, current arrangements, then it is difficult to see how essence could make it the case that if R then p. The essence of a human body does not include the fact that it will sneeze given this precise configuration, because sneezing is multiply realisable and not tied to any particular physical microstructure. The essence of a car does not include its current speed limitations, because those too can change without altering what the car is. In these cases, the conditional seems not to be grounded in essence at all.

If, on the other hand, one expands R to include modal facts, laws, dispositions, similarity relations between possible situations, then the account becomes extensionally adequate but explanatorily empty from the essentialist point of view. The necessity now comes from those modal facts themselves, not from essence. Essence is reduced to a classificatory role, telling us that a certain physical state counts as sneezing or as travelling at a certain speed, but not explaining why that state is necessary or possible. The very advantage of essentialism, that it explains necessity by its source, is lost. One either fails to capture the phenomena or captures them in a way that bypasses essence altogether.

This is the dilemma that pushes Vetter toward the second strategy, restriction. Here the direction of explanation is reversed. Instead of trying to derive ordinary modality from metaphysical necessity, one treats ordinary modality as the broad field and metaphysical modality as a special case within it. A proposition is metaphysically necessary if and only if it is an ordinary necessity whose source lies in essence. Ordinary necessity is not reduced to essence, nor is it unified by a single source. It may arise from laws, dispositions, structural constraints, or other features of reality. Essence is one source among others, but it is the source that yields the strongest, most stable, most invariant necessities.

This move is radical because it inverts the usual hierarchy. Essentialism is no longer the theory of modality as such, but the theory of one particularly important kind of modality, the kind that concerns the nature of things. Metaphysical necessity is not the most general necessity but the most fundamental in a different sense, the one tied to essence. Ordinary modality becomes the starting point, what Aristotle would call what is familiar to us, and metaphysical modality is carved out within it by reference to a distinctive source.

Once this shift is made, a number of features fall into place. The variability of ordinary modality is no longer a problem, because not all necessity is supposed to be grounded in essence. The time-sensitivity of ordinary modality is also no longer in tension with the timelessness of essence, because only a subset of necessities, those grounded in essence, inherit that invariance. The intuitive difference in strength between different kinds of necessity can be understood in terms of degrees rather than kinds. Metaphysical necessity is stronger because its source, essence, is more rigid, more resistant to change, less susceptible to intervention. It would take, as Fine puts it, more of a God to overturn it.

When this framework is brought back to the educational discussion, the shift is quite profound. Up to now, we have been tempted to treat concepts such as decolonisation and demasculinisation analysis as if their modal force, what must be the case within them, what can or cannot be done within them, might ultimately be traced to their essences. Even when we weakened this picture under Fine’s critique of overly strict definition, we still tended to assume that the deepest modal structure of these concepts would be essentialist in character.

Vetter’s proposal suggests that this is mistaken, or at least incomplete. Much of the modality that governs educational practice is ordinary modality. It concerns what can be done in a classroom given available time, institutional constraints, student dispositions, cultural expectations, legal frameworks, and so on. It concerns what must be done in a given situation, what is feasible, what is ruled out, what is fragile or robust. These are all modal facts, but they are not plausibly grounded in the essences of the relevant educational entities. They are grounded in a heterogeneous mixture of factors, many of which are contingent, changeable, and context-sensitive.

Take a concrete case. It may be true in a given school that it is impossible to restructure the curriculum along fully decolonial lines within a year. That is an ordinary necessity. It arises from staffing constraints, assessment regimes, parental expectations, and institutional inertia. None of these are part of the essence of the school, nor of the curriculum, nor of decolonisation. They are circumstantial. Yet the modal claim is real and constraining. It shapes action and judgement. On a relativisation model, one would try to fold this into metaphysical necessity via conditions, but Vetter shows that this either fails or trivialises the role of essence. On the restriction model, one simply recognises this as an instance of ordinary modality, with its own sources.

At the same time, some modal claims in education do appear to have an essentialist character. If it is part of the essence of education that it involves the formation of capacities rather than mere behavioural outputs, then it may be metaphysically necessary that an activity which entirely bypasses the formation of understanding does not count as education in the relevant sense. If it is part of the essence of a practice that it involves recognition of the learner as a subject, then it may be metaphysically necessary that certain forms of purely instrumental manipulation fall outside it. These are not context-sensitive in the same way. They do not vary with timetabling or resources. They are harder constraints.

The key change, then, is that we should no longer expect a single modal framework to govern educational concepts. Instead, we should expect a layered structure. At one level, there is ordinary modality, governing what can and must be done given circumstances, resources, and constraints. At another level, there is metaphysical modality, governing what follows from the nature of education, of teaching, of learning, of authority, of knowledge. The two interact, but neither reduces to the other.

This also sharpens the earlier discussion of incompossibility. When we considered whether decolonisation and demasculinisation might be incompossible, we were often implicitly sliding between levels. Some tensions are ordinary. They arise because given current institutional structures, pursuing one project makes it difficult to pursue another. These are contingent and potentially resolvable. Others may be deeper. They may arise because the forms of explanation, authority, or recognition built into the projects are not jointly sustainable. Those would be closer to metaphysical tensions, grounded in what the projects are.

Vetter’s framework allows us to separate these. It becomes possible to say that two educational projects are ordinarily incompossible in a given context without being metaphysically incompossible. It also becomes possible, more controversially, to suggest that some projects might be metaphysically incompossible, not merely difficult to implement together, but structurally at odds in their essential commitments. The analytic task is then to determine which kind of modality is at issue.

Finally, this reframing has implications for the scepticism I have encountered about metaphysics in education. Part of that scepticism rests on the thought that metaphysics is too abstract, too detached from practice, too concerned with necessities that have no bearing on what can actually be done. Vetter’s move shows that this criticism has a point if metaphysics is taken to be the theory of all modality. But if metaphysics is instead the theory of a particular source of modality, essence, then it occupies a more precise place. It does not replace the analysis of practical constraints, but it clarifies the boundaries within which such analysis makes sense. It tells us what cannot be given up without changing the subject.

In that sense, the integration of Fine, Vetter, and the broader essentialist framework into educational thinking does not impose a rigid, overly abstract structure on practice. It differentiates levels of modal constraint. It allows educationalists to say, with greater precision, which limitations are merely circumstantial, which are structural, which are revisable, and which are not. And it opens the possibility that some of the deepest disagreements in contemporary educational theory are not simply disagreements about policy or feasibility, but about the sources and strengths of the necessities that govern what education can be.

However, Fine does want to push back somewhat, so the next note will have a look at what he says.