Tim Williamson thinks it is. But I’m not convinced. This is a little paper where I explain (some of the reasons) why I’m not convinced.

Williamson relies heavily on (what he thinks of as) logical equivalences between modal propositions and certain counterfactuals. But such logical equivalences (even assuming that’s what they are) could not support the claim that modal epistemology is just counterfactual epistemology. Or so I claim.

Compare: disjunctive propositions (A v B) are logically equivalent to negated conjunctive propositions ¬(¬A & ¬B). But that doesn’t mean the epistemology of disjunctions reduces to the epistemology of negated conjunctions.

The challenge to Williamson is to say why the equivalences he’s interested in are of more epistemological significance than this. It is a challenge which, this paper argues, he has not met in his various discussions of this topic.