Modal expressions—expressions like ‘must’ and ‘can’—figure importantly in our ability to think and talk about things that are non-actual: people who are not actual (e.g., ‘There could have been a Tom Collins’1), events that did not happen (e.g., ‘He could have been spreading rumors’), ways in which events that happen do not happen (e.g., ‘Rome could have been built in a day’), etc. These expres...

Technical mediation shapes our experience of the world, but it also shapes our experience of ourselves. In this paper, I argue that in order to understand the latter aspect of technical mediation, we need to expand on notions of technical mediation that focuses on actual use, and bring in possible use as well. The concept of technical mediation must therefore be grounded in a more general conce...