Vetter: A Note on Metaphysics, Logic and Epistemology in Philosophy of Education (2)

Let's add a new level of depth to the question already opened by the Fine Williamson dispute discussed in the previous note. That earlier dispute helped us distinguish between necessity and essence, between what must be the case and what belongs to the nature of a thing, and it showed why a philosophy of education concerned with understanding cannot rest content with merely extensionally correct outputs. But before we ask whether a learner has grasped an essence, or whether educational understanding is merely modal rather than essential, we may need to ask what kind of modality educational discourse itself traffics in when it says things like “the student cannot yet do this,” “she must now move to abstraction,” “he could solve this if given more time,” “they are able to reason historically,” or “it is impossible to understand this theorem without grasping the proof idea.” These are not usually claims of pure metaphysical necessity, nor are they usually merely deontic claims about obligation, nor merely epistemic claims about what is likely. They belong to that elusive region the philosopher Barbara Vetter calls ordinary modality. 

Educational life is saturated with such ordinary modal language. Teachers, assessors, policymakers, and students are constantly making modal claims. They say a child can read but cannot yet infer, that a task must take sustained practice, that a pupil could flourish under different conditions, that one cannot expect conceptual mastery before procedural fluency, that a school must be calmer before serious learning can occur, that no student can write well without reading widely, that under current conditions some outcomes are impossible. These are plainly modal judgements. They are not just descriptions of what is the case, but claims about what can, must, cannot, or might happen under certain conditions. Yet educational theory often treats such claims in a very loose way. It uses them, but rarely analyses them. What Vetter and Fine help us see is that this neglect matters, because our entire picture of learning, development, assessment, and institutional possibility depends upon how such ordinary modalities are understood.

The first thing to notice is the basic distinction between special modalities and ordinary modality. Special modalities are the more formal, philosophically regimented notions, metaphysical necessity, logical necessity, nomological necessity, perhaps essential necessity. These are the kinds of necessity typically represented in formal semantics by an operator like □ attached to a sentence A, giving □A, necessarily A. Ordinary modality, by contrast, belongs to everyday discourse. It is expressed through modal idioms such as “can,” “must,” “possible,” “impossible,” and “necessary,” when these are used neither deontically, in the sense of obligation, nor epistemically, in the sense of what the speaker takes to be likely or known, but circumstantially, that is, in relation to what the circumstances allow or require. “Mary had to sneeze,” “I can ride a bicycle,” “it is necessary that the journey take at least ten hours,” these are Vetter’s kinds of case.

Already this distinction should matter to philosophy of education because much educational discourse is circumstantial in precisely this sense. When a teacher says that a child can now reason proportionally, that another cannot yet handle irony, or that this classroom must become quieter before serious attention is possible, the teacher is usually not making a metaphysical claim in the strict sense. But nor are they merely stating a personal opinion. They are locating what can and cannot occur relative to a field of conditions, developmental, institutional, cognitive, affective, material. Ordinary educational language is thus thick with ordinary modality.

What Fine finds interesting in Vetter is her neglected question of how this ordinary modality connects with special modalities. When we say that a child cannot yet solve equations, or understand a moral concept, what exactly are we claiming. Are we saying that, given the actual state of her understanding, success is impossible? Are we saying that, given the current teaching sequence, it would violate the developmental order of the subject? Are we saying that, under the laws of psychology and learning, this result cannot yet be expected? Are we saying only that, within current school conventions, such performance is not ordinarily possible? These are quite different things. Yet ordinary educational discourse often compresses them into the same modal vocabulary.

Vetter’s proposal, in its initial form, is that ordinary necessity may be understood by relativising a special necessity to conditions. The rough idea is this: it is ordinarily necessary that p just in case there are relevant conditions R such that, given R, it is specially necessary that p. If, for example, the special modality is metaphysical necessity one gets the schema that it is ordinarily necessary that p if and only if the relevant conditions obtain and it is metaphysically necessary that if those conditions obtain, then p. The thought is attractive because it seems to explain the softness and context-sensitivity of ordinary modality without collapsing it into mere loose talk. Ordinary necessity would then be a conditioned form of harder necessity. Many educational judgements take exactly this rough form. Suppose someone says that it is necessary that a pupil spend many months reading aloud before reading silently with understanding. The claim is ordinarily modal. But perhaps what is really meant is something like this: given the conditions of early literacy acquisition, the structure of written language, and the developmental facts about beginner readers, it is necessary that if those conditions obtain, then prolonged practice is required. Or consider the claim that no one can understand Shakespeare instantly at age eight. What may be meant is not absolute impossibility, but necessity relative to a set of relevant conditions concerning linguistic complexity, historical distance, emotional maturity, and interpretive practice.

However, Fine shows that once we try to state this link between ordinary and special modality precisely, significant difficulties arise. One issue is formal shape. Special modalities are usually expressed with sentential operators governing whole propositions, □A. But many ordinary modal sentences are not so neatly shaped. “I can ride a bicycle” does not obviously present itself as a modal operator attached to a full sentence in the same way. This matters because if we want to analyse ordinary modality using the apparatus of special modality, we need to know where the modal force is attached and what proposition is being modalised. In education, the same difficulty appears constantly. “She can reason abstractly,” “he cannot attend for long,” “they must revisit the concept,” these are not always easily translatable into neatly bounded propositions of the form necessarily if R then p. Educational modal discourse is grammatically and conceptually messy, and that messiness itself reflects the complexity of the phenomena.

If we set those harder cases aside and focus on ordinary modal sentences that can be put into the right form there are still difficulties. Fine argues that once context enters, the analysis becomes tricky. The ordinary claim “it is necessary that p” is context-sensitive. What counts as relevant conditions depends on the context. In one educational conversation, “it is necessary that p” may mean necessary given the child’s current developmental stage. In another, it may mean necessary given the curriculum sequence. In another, necessary given the social conditions of the classroom. Thus the context determines the relevant conditions Rc.

Now a question arises. How does Rc relate in scope to the special modality. Does the sentence mean that the conditions determined by the context are such that, given them, p is specially necessary. Or does it somehow say something more direct about the context itself. Fine argues that the context should not itself become part of the necessity claim in the wrong way. When a teacher says that it is necessary for a child to do x before fluent reading, the teacher is not saying anything directly about this specific context as such. They are saying that whatever the relevant conditions are in this pedagogic context, those conditions necessitate the learning path x in question. This is a subtle point, but educationally it is crucial. It means that educational modal judgements are often non-specific. They do not usually name all the relevant conditions explicitly. They invoke a contextually governed standard of relevance.

This leads Fine to a more sophisticated formulation. Rather than saying simply that “it is necessary that p in context c” means such-and-such, he suggests we should say that the ordinary modal sentence, uttered in context c, expresses a proposition to the effect that there are relevant conditions R, relevant by the standards of that context, such that R obtains and necessarily if R then p. This is a move from material mode to formal mode, from trying to define the ordinary modal sentence directly to specifying the proposition expressed by its utterance in context. Whew. Ok. Let's unpack that.  

Consider a headteacher saying, “it is impossible to improve writing in this school without changing reading culture.” The force of this utterance is not exhausted by the words themselves. Its content depends on the standards of relevance operative in the setting, perhaps assumptions about literacy acquisition, staff expertise, timetable constraints, social expectations, and so on. The utterance expresses a proposition whose shape is roughly existential and conditional: there are relevant conditions, obtaining here, such that given those conditions, improvement in writing without improved reading culture is impossible. The point is not merely linguistic. It shows that educational modal judgements are often compressed expressions of structured background commitments. I say making those commitments explicit is philosophically and practically transformative.

Fine then goes a step further by reformulating the connection in terms of ground. Ground, in contemporary metaphysics, is a relation of metaphysical explanation, a way of saying that one fact obtains in virtue of another. If an ordinary modal proposition says, in effect, that there are relevant conditions under which p is necessary, then, if that proposition is true, it will be grounded at least in part in some particular instance, some actual condition R0 such that necessarily if R0 then p. In other words, each true ordinary modal claim is at least partially grounded in a special modal truth linked to some specific condition.

This notion of partial ground can significantly deepen educational theory. Much educational discourse uses modal language without identifying what grounds it. For example, teachers may say that a certain child cannot yet write analytically. But what grounds that claim? Is it grounded in the child’s current vocabulary range, in their still fragile grasp of causal language, in the curriculum’s sequencing, in institutional expectations, in broader developmental regularities? Fine’s apparatus suggests that such claims should not remain at the level of ordinary modality alone. We should ask after their ground. What particular configuration of conditions partially grounds the modal judgement? This changes how educational problems are understood and acted upon. A vague modal claim becomes analysable into conditioned structure. 

At this point Fine notes another deep issue, namely the division of labour between conditions and modality. Suppose in one context the special modality is nomological necessity, necessity relative to laws of nature or lawful regularities. One could either say that the modality itself is nomological, or instead treat the modality as logical and build the nomological facts into the conditions R. Fine’s inclination is to resist collapsing this distinction. Under a fine-grained criterion of propositional identity, there is a real difference between what belongs to the conditions and what belongs to the modal force. The conditions should ideally be characterised non-modally, leaving the modality to do its own distinctive work.

This is a very powerful suggestion for educational thinking. Educational theory often confuses conditions with modal force. Sometimes what is really a claim about conditions is presented as a claim about impossibility or necessity. For instance, “these pupils cannot learn under direct instruction” may in fact mean that under the present social, affective, and pedagogic conditions, direct instruction will not succeed. Alternatively, one might think there is something lawlike about the pedagogy itself. Those are different claims. Fine’s insistence on a division of labour can help us distinguish between non-modal basis and modal force. In educational research and practice, this would encourage much greater clarity. Are we saying that some specific set of social and cognitive conditions obtains, or are we saying that, once those conditions are fixed, a distinctive kind of necessity attaches to the outcome?

Fine also criticises Vetter’s dilemma concerning whether the relevant conditions R are non-modal or modal. Vetter argues that if R is wholly non-modal, it will often fail to necessitate the result; but if R includes modal facts, then the analysis becomes explanatorily redundant, because modality has already been smuggled into the conditions. Fine thinks the problem does not lie simply in the conditions being non-modal, but in their determination being non-modal. A non-modal generalisation may belong among the conditions because of its nomological standing. So the truth of the ordinary modal claim may still depend upon lawlike status, even if the condition itself is stated non-modally.

This opens a very important path for educational thought. Much educational explanation oscillates between bare empirical description and overgeneralised modal claims. Fine’s point suggests a middle route. One can allow that non-modal educational conditions, classroom structure, vocabulary exposure, opportunities for retrieval, background trust, repeated practice, can enter into a modal explanation not because they are themselves modal, but because their status within a wider explanatory order gives them modal significance. This may help educational theory avoid two familiar mistakes. One is flat descriptivism, where all we have are lists of factors. The other is inflated necessity talk, where contingent regularities are treated as hard necessities. Fine’s apparatus allows us to say that a given educational regularity may have modal force relative to a structured field without being metaphysically hard in the strongest sense.

This leads to the issue of “hardness.” One reason metaphysical necessity has seemed distinctive is that it has a special firmness or hardness. It is not merely that something happens under present conditions, but that it could not have been otherwise in a deeper way. Fine doubts that one can account for this hardness merely by defining metaphysical necessity as one species of ordinary necessity. Saying that metaphysical necessity is a necessity whose source lies in essence may classify it, but does not yet explain what gives it its distinctive modal force. The analogy he uses is that saying something is a colour does not explain why some colours are darker than others. The darkness must belong somehow to the colours themselves.

I think this notion of hardness has rich educational implications. Educational theory often speaks as if some necessities are hard and others soft, but without analysing the difference. For example, there is a difference between saying that students cannot currently concentrate because the room is too hot, saying that novice learners cannot yet solve integral calculus because prerequisite concepts are absent, and saying that no human education can dispense altogether with time, dependency, practice, trust, and embodiment. These seem to differ not just in content but in degree and kind of modal hardness. The first may be highly contingent and easily alterable. The second may be developmentally robust. The third may gesture toward something deeper about the nature of human learning. Fine’s framework suggests that educational thinking would benefit from explicitly distinguishing among different kinds of necessity and from asking what gives each its hardness.

At this point we can see how the Vetter Fine issue significantly deepens the earlier use of the Fine Williamson dispute in philosophy of education. That dispute pushed us to distinguish correctness from essence, surface equivalence from hyperintensional structure. The Vetter discussion now pushes us to analyse the modal field within which educational life is conducted. It asks not only whether learning involves grasp of essence, but how our ordinary educational judgements of ability, impossibility, and requirement are themselves structured. It suggests that education is not merely a site where modal notions happen to be used. It is a domain whose practical rationality is constitutively modal.

I think educational thinking frequently suffers from modal confusion. Sometimes policy discourse speaks with false hardness, as if a particular accountability system, or a particular assessment structure, were necessary rather than historically contingent. Sometimes progressive discourse speaks with false softness, as if all constraints were negotiable and no developmental or disciplinary necessities existed. Sometimes teachers make powerful but compressed modal judgements whose grounds remain tacit. Sometimes students internalise ordinary modal claims about themselves, “I can’t do maths,” “I could never write like that,” “I must be bad at languages,” without any careful discrimination between contingent condition, current disposition, disciplinary sequence, and supposedly fixed nature. A more exact modal vocabulary could therefore reshape both pedagogy and self-understanding.

One could, drawing on Fine here, imagine a remodelled educational framework in which modal claims are systematically unpacked. Instead of saying simply that a student cannot yet perform a task, one asks: what is the relevant ordinary modal proposition being expressed, what standards of relevance are in play, what non-modal conditions are being presupposed, what special modality is doing the work, developmental, nomological, logical, institutional, and what grounds the truth of the claim? Such a framework would not only clarify educational judgement but make it more revisable where appropriate and more defensible where firmness is required.

It would also reshape assessment. Current systems often evaluate actual performance while making unstated modal assumptions about what students can do, could have done, or should now be capable of. Fine’s apparatus suggests that such assumptions should be brought to the surface. When an examiner decides that an answer shows misunderstanding, the judgement typically relies on a view about what grasp of this concept makes possible, what it excludes, and what would follow if understanding were present. That is already a modal judgement. To acknowledge this is to recognise that assessment is not simply descriptive. It is metaphysically and epistemologically loaded.

Moreover, the distinction between ground and modality offers a way of rethinking intervention. Educational practice often oscillates between changing conditions and redescribing capacities. Fine’s model suggests we should ask whether a problematic educational modality is grounded in alterable conditions or in a harder structure. If a child cannot currently participate, is this grounded in classroom acoustics, peer dynamics, linguistic insecurity, lack of background knowledge, or something more deeply developmental. If the impossibility is condition-grounded, intervention should target the conditions. If it reflects a harder necessity of sequence or structure, intervention may need to work with the grain of that necessity rather than against it. This does not produce a recipe, but it does produce a more disciplined form of educational judgement.

Finally, the broader philosophical consequence is that educational understanding itself may need to be reconceived as modal through and through. To understand a concept is not merely to know what is actual, but to grasp what follows from what, what can vary without collapse, what depends on what, what would be possible under altered conditions, what is ruled out by the structure of the thing. 

This is where the Fine Williamson and Fine Vetter discussions converge. Hyperintensional understanding concerns the structure of a content, what belongs to it essentially, what grounds it, what makes it the content it is. Ordinary modality concerns how, within lived contexts, we register possibilities, constraints, requirements, and impossibilities. An educational theory that brought these together would have a far richer account of learning than one focused on output, skill, knowledge or information alone. Such a theory would treat education as a practice of orienting persons within a structured modal space. Learners are not merely accumulating true propositions. They are learning what they can do, what must be the case for further movement, what depends on what, which impossibilities are temporary and condition-bound, which are conceptual, which are institutional artefacts, and which are genuine features of human formation. Teachers, likewise, are not merely delivering content. They are constantly making and revising modal judgements under context-sensitive standards of relevance. And institutions are not neutral containers for this process. They actively shape which conditions are treated as salient, which modalities are made visible, and which necessities are falsely naturalised.

Fine’s engagement with Vetter offers philosophy of education is a way of seeing educational life as structured by layers of modality whose grammar, grounding, and hardness can be analysed. Once seen in this way, educational thinking can become at once more exact and more humane. It can become more exact because it learns to distinguish kinds of necessity, sources of modal force, and grounds of possibility. It can become more humane because it is less likely to confuse a child’s current condition with their nature, less likely to naturalise institutional arrangements as necessities, and more likely to see learning as movement within a field of conditions whose modal shape can often be changed.