David Corfield Brandon on modality

Idea

The Kant-Sellars thesis about modality

In From empiricism to expressivism:

…in being able to use nonmodal, empirical descriptive vocabulary, one already know how to do everything one needs to know how to do in order to deploy modal vocabulary, which according can be understood as making explicit structural features that are always already implicit in what one does in describing. (Brandom 2015, p. 143)

The uses of nonmodal vocabulary being made explicit by modal language include those where one describes how the state of something would be under certain kinds of variation of its current situation.

Between Saying and Doing

We now know, thanks to Danielle Macbeth’s Frege’s Logic, that Frege’s own Begriffsschrift notation did not share the expressive impoverishments with respect to modality exhibited by the extensional first-order logic that Russell, and following him, everyone else, drew from it. (Between Saying and Doing, p.93n2)

The ability to use ordinary empirical descriptive terms such as ‘green’, ‘rigid’, and ‘mass’ already presupposes grasp of the kinds of properties and relations made explicit by modal vocabulary. (pp. 96-97)

Subtle difference (97n4) between Sellars and Kant as to whether it’s the content of the concept itself or rather its use that makes for the modal.

Husserl on Time

Is there not a parallel with

According to Husserl even the most passive experience involves not only the retention of the just past but also the tacit anticipation, or what he calls protention, of the future. His point is not simply that we have the psychological capacity to project and to remember. His claim is the conceptual one that we cannot even experience anything as happening, as present, except against the background of what it succeeds and what we anticipate will succeed it. (Carr 1986, p.121)

Narrative and the Real World: An Argument for Continuity Author(s): David Carr Source: History and Theory , May, 1986, Vol. 25, No. 2 (May, 1986), pp. 117-131

One of the modalities is temporal. To understand the world requires sensing temporal variance and invariance.