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This chapter provides a general framework for properly understanding Kant's famous modal-epistemological slogan, ‘reason has insight only into what it self-produces according to its own design,’ in terms of active a priori knowledge and pure practical reason, while rejecting any appeal to strong transcendental idealism, and also effectively avoiding platonism, conventionalism, scientific essentialism, and modal scepticism alike. This framework will be supplied in four stages. First, Kant's theory of epistemic necessity and epistemic apriority is explicated. Then, this theory is exemplified with a case study: his account of conceptual insight into simple analytic truths. Third, some remarks are made about the special role of insight in Kant's overall conception of a priori knowledge. Finally, the concept of insight in terms of his notion of theoretical technique is briefly reexplicated.

This chapter shows that the principle of the necessity of identity, which precludes proper treatment of names in standard possible worlds semantics, fails for logical and epistemic necessity. Model structures allow contingent identities as long as the co-representation relation is non-transitive. It is shown that there is no sound argument from the rigidity of names to the necessity of identity, and that other well known arguments for this principle are either invalid or question begging. The rigidity of names extends to worlds that are mere logical or epistemological possibilities, and is intensional.

Chapter 2 states the analysis of modality to be developed, provides some initial motivation for it, and highlights a few of its distinctive features. It starts with a discussion of three plausible ideas about what distinguishes necessary truths from contingent ones, namely that their truth is particularly invariable, unconditional, and secure. When developed in the most natural way, each idea suggests that a proposition is necessary iff it holds at all worlds that have at least a certain degree of closeness to actuality. Necessity and possibility come in degrees. Moreover, modality is “holistic”: a scenario’s degree of possibility is determined by features of the maximally specific scenarios (worlds) where it obtains. The view entails that metaphysical necessity and epistemic necessity (a priori truth) are two fundamentally different forms of modality, yet the account isn’t less economical than two-dimensionalism, according to which there is only a single kind of modality.