Vaidya’s Method of Variation in Imagination Revisited: a Web-Consequentialist Approach

In our daily lives, we often make claims about what is possible or necessary, prompting the question of how we come to acquire these modal claims. In this paper we examine what Vaidya and Wallner have called the "problem of modal epistemic friction." According to this problem, some accounts of modal knowledge presuppose essentialist theses, thereby making the epistemology of modality a special case of the epistemology of essences. Vaidya advances an essence-based account centered on the method of “variation in imagination” (VIM), wherein the essential properties of an object are those that remain constant across imaginative variations over time. However, since this method is closed under logical consequence, it identifies what—in Finean terms—constitutes consequential rather than constitutive essences. In this paper, we aim to refine Vaidya's proposal by offering a way to capture constitutive essences, starting from a consequential perspective. To do so, we will draw on the notion of web consequence (WC), as developed by Schnieder, which helps distinguish constitutive essences from those which are merely consequential.