During the project research, it became clear to me that the usual way of thinking of modalities in philosophy, in terms of possible worlds, is inappropriate to analyse the role played by different kinds of modalities and in particular to establish the distinction between context and content on which these differences seem to rest. The researcher started to develop an alternative view based on the notion of situation that he had already used in his previous work, where a situation represents the particular focus of modelers. It can be characterised in terms of an anchor, that is, a state of affairs of reference, and a partition of possibility space for this state of affairs, that is, a relevant class of contrast. This way of thinking allows one to distinguish between the modalities that concern our intentional attitudes towards representations, or towards the context itself, and the modalities that concern the represented situation: what is possible or not for the situation that the model is about. They respectively correspond to epistemic, practical and natural modalities. This analysis appears to be in line with analyses of modal talk in linguistics, where the scope of modals can concern either full sentences ("it is possible that p") or particular objects ("it is possible for X to Y"). The latter are normally interpreted as objective possibilities, and the former as epistemic possibilities in ordinary discourse. We find the same scope relation in scientific modeling if we take a model to be analogous with a proposition about its target system. My work thus sheds light on what distinguishes various modals, and how they interface with modelling activities.
The distinction between a context that is the object of intentional attitudes, and a content that represent natural possibilities, has implications for various topics. The researcher presented it in relation with the interpretation of quantum mechanics, where he defended that identifying contexts with frameworks in the consistent histories formulation helps solve interpretive problems. He also examined its relation with the empirical status of coordinate system symmetries in physics, arguing that it blocks a symmetry-to-reality inference, and to cosmological arguments and self-location uncertainty issues, where he defend that this context corresponds to a Bayesian background in inferences, which has important implications on how to formulate such cosmological arguments. Another outcome of the project is the speculation that we can organise representational contexts (what models are about) in a hierarchy of abstraction, where abstract contexts are ranges of possible concrete contexts, in a practical sense of possibility, associated with various potential aims. This idea has implications for the notion of scientific objectivity and the role of social values in science. It allows for a compromise between defenders and detractors of the value-free ideal, if we accept to associate abstraction with a detachement from local values.
The project has shown that an alternative to possible world semantics is needed in order to properly analyse representation in science in general. This led to a new research project that has been accepted for funding by FCT, Portugal. The project is to establish bridges between the notion of aboutness in philosophy of language and scientific representation.
