Forthcoming in Acta Analytica

My paper 'Linking Necessity to Apriority' is forthcoming in Acta Analytica. It grew out of this blog post, although the proposal in the post is slightly different and, if not false, seems to require Millianism about proper names, which I don't want to have to require. (Two anonymous referees for Acta Analytica made me see this.) I arrived at the basic idea of the paper during my PhD work. It's a kind of stripped-down, partial version of the more ambitious account of necessity developed in my thesis. If it's right, it shows a clear, straightforward way in which our knowledge of modal status can always be traced back to a crucial a priori factor.

It's my first publication to contain a clear and positive theoretical proposal. My previous publications have either been mainly negative, or in the case of my paper on identity statements, positive in a way but hard to get a grip on, and the sort of thing that only sympathetic minds would accept. This, on the other hand, seems more "mathematical", more like something that quite differently minded philosophers might accept. It impinges on recent work by Kipper and Strohminger & Yli-Vakkuri, which I have discussed quite a bit here on this blog.