Possible Worlds II: Non-reductive Theories of Possible Worlds
2009, Philosophy Compass
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Abstract
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This work explores non-reductive theories of possible worlds, addressing their application beyond mere modal reduction. It critiques standard approaches, identifying user-hostility in theories that deny the existence of possible worlds, indulge in excessive ontological commitments, or require controversial modal claims. By examining the intuitive features of modal claims, particularly through the lens of identities and careers of individuals, the paper seeks to clarify the nature of possible worlds and their utility in philosophical discourse.
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It is difficult to wander far in contemporary metaphysics without bumping into talk of possible worlds. And reference to possible worlds is not confined to metaphysics. It can be found in contemporary epistemology and ethics, and has even made its way into linguistics and decision theory. What are those possible worlds, the entities to which theorists in these disciplines all appeal? This paper sets out and evaluates a leading contemporary theory of possible worlds, David Lewis's Modal Realism. I note two competing ambitions for a theory of possible worlds: that it be reductive and user-friendly. I then outline Modal Realism and consider objections to the effect that it cannot satisfy these ambitions. I conclude that there is some reason to believe that Modal Realism is not reductive and overwhelming reason to believe that it is not user-friendly.
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Worlds, Possible and Impossible (Elsevier), 2024
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Possible Worlds for Modal Primitivists
Journal of Philosophical Logic, 2012
Among the most remarkable developments in metaphysics since the 1950's is the explosion of philosophical interest in possible worlds. This paper proposes an explanation of what possible worlds are, and argues that this proposal, the interpreted models conception, should be attractive to anyone who thinks that modal facts are primitive, and so not to be explained in terms of some non-modal notion of "possible world." I articulate three constraints on any acceptable primitivist explanation of the nature of possible worlds, and show that the interpreted models conception meets the three constraints. there were and what they were like. 1 Providing a non-modal explanation of the notion of being a possible world has occupied center stage in the thought of these philosophers. It will not, however, occupy center stage here. We are not going to require here that the notion of being a possible world be explained in thoroughly non-modal terms. Suppose, then, that modal primitivism is true: some modal facts cannot be reduced to, or even explained in terms of, any congeries of exclusively non-modal facts. Even granting that (SC) does not provide fodder for an explanation of modal facts in non-modal terms, there remain a number of alternative views of (SC)'s significance. One could suggest, for instance, that instances of (SC) are simply meaningless, since they all crucially employ the notion of being a possible world, and that notion has not been explained. Alternatively, one could simply deny that there are any possible worlds. Then there will be instances of (SC)-those involving true possibility claims-that are false. If we take either of these skeptical lines, then much of contemporary modal metaphysics will turn out to be either meaningless or a pack of falsehoods. And other disciplines that make liberal use of possible worlds, e.g. some strands of linguistics, ethics, epistemology, and decision theory, will suffer from the same defect. 2 This need not imply that talk of possible worlds in all of these
Dualism about Possible Worlds
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Dualism about possible worlds says that merely possible worlds aren’t concrete objects, but the actual world is concrete. This view seems to be the natural one for ersatzers about merely possible worlds to take; yet one is hard-pressed to find any defenders (or even mention) of it in contemporary modal metaphysics. The main reason is that Dualism struggles with the issue of how merely possible worlds could have been actual (or vice versa). I explain that there are two different Dualist strategies that can be taken to address the problem. Furthermore, one or other of these strategies should be plausible to anyone who accepts both Existentialism—which tells us that the existence of singular propositions depends on what they directly refer to—and Serious Actualism—which tells us that things must exist in order to instantiate properties. Though it has long been ignored, Dualism is a live option.
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2013
The paper deals with such a modification of genuine modal realism as to accommodate impossible worlds into its ontology. First of all, the theory of modal realism is presented. Next, several motivations for the acceptance of impossible worlds are adduced. Further, Lewis’s argument against impossible worlds is presented. It is argued that the argument can be weakened by rejection of one of its premises. Finally, two objections against the proposal are countered. Although my strategy accounts for the Opinion concerning the impossible, it allegedly violates another Opinion which conceives the reality classical. It seems, however, that there is no no-question-begging reason to think that reality is classical. How can we know, after all, which logic describes reality? Without a definite answer to the question, the incredibility objection then simply collapses into a statement of a possibilist dogma.
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Filozofski vestnik, 2021
The aim of this essay is not to provide a solution to a theoretical problem or a clear guide to political action, but merely to point out 1 -in the least technical way possible -certain pitfalls that await us when we attempt to define the concept of world. The latter, in fact, is one of those concepts that seem simple, clear, and self-evident, but ultimately turn out to be very slippery, elusive, and tricky. The very mention of the word "world" constantly leads to ambiguity and paradox for several reasons. First, the word "world" constantly shifts between its cosmological, ontological, theological, chronological, anthropological, sociological, political, and existential meanings. 2 Second, the word "world" can have contradictory meanings even within a single meaning, especially with regard to its definition in terms of space, time, and ontology. The consequences of this affect its strict definition. Moreover, third, the world involves a peculiar paradox. It is with us from the beginning, it is always already there, but not really, or at least not yet completely -what appears to us as the world is either not the world at all, but an erroneous, inaccurate, or false conception of it, or the world itself is not yet at the level of its own concept. Yes, the world is there, but that does not mean it is simply identified with being (all that is) out there. This may seem strange, since "being there", "presence", "the outside", "the real world", and "the external reality" are often used as synonyms for "the world". There are 1 This article is a result of the research programme P6-0014 "Conditions and Problems of Contemporary Philosophy" and the research project J6-9392 "The Problem of Objectivity and Fiction in Contemporary Philosophy", which are funded by the Slovenian Research Agency. There is, of course, a great deal of philosophical discussion on this subject. Although we will not deal with the history of these discussions, here we have drawn on the following recent overviews of the subject:
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arXiv: Logic, 2018
This short squib looks at how using a broader definition of G\"odel numbering to mimic the accessibility relation between possible worlds results in two-world systems that sidestep undecidable sentences as well as the Liar paradox.
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In this paper, I argue for a particular conception of impossible worlds. Possible worlds, as traditionally understood, can be used in the analysis of propositions, the content of belief, the truth of counterfactuals, and so on. Yet possible worlds are not capable of differentiating propositions that are necessarily equivalent, making sense of the beliefs of agents who are not ideally rational, or giving truth values to counterfactuals with necessarily false antecedents. The addition of impossible worlds addresses these issues. The kinds of impossible worlds capable of performing this task are not mysterious sui generis entities, but sets of structured propositions that are themselves constructed out of possible worlds and relations. I also respond to a worry that these impossible worlds are unable to represent claims about the shape of modal space itself.
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The Quasi-Truth theory offered an important formal approach to the understanding both partiality scientific knowledge – through the so called " partial structures " – so a theory capable of dealing with the notion of " pragmatic truth ". Some important notions that we find in scientific works that scapes from the formal treatment offered by the theory of quasi-truth are modal notions as, for example, necessity, possibility and counterfactual statements. In this work we intend to develop a possible worlds semantics for the Quasi-Truth theory, by preserving the approach of both partiality of scientific and pragmatic truth, but also offering an interpretation for modal operators. Within this formalism, we shall show that we can get several different modal systems. Generally speaking, our aim is to reach to a theory that comprises the concept of quasi-truth and that is able to treat modality as is applied to scientific theories.
On the plurality of worlds
1986
is one of the most influential philosophers of our age, and On the Plurality of Worlds is his magnum opus. OPW 1 offers an extended development and defense of the hypothesis that there are many universes, things of the same kind as the universe in which we all live, move, and have our being. Lewis calls these universes-worlds‖, deliberately recalling the notion of a-possible world‖ familiar from modal logic and the metaphysics of modality. The title invokes the thesis of the book: there are pluralities of worlds, things of the same kind as the world we inhabit, differing only with respect to what goes on in them. Lewis sought in earlier work (Lewis, 1973, pp. 84-86) to offer a direct argument from common sense modal commitments to the existence of a plurality of worlds. 2 OPW offers a less direct argument. Here, Lewis supports the hypothesis by arguing that, if we accept it, we have the material to offer a wide range of analyses of hitherto puzzling and problematic notions. We thereby effect a theoretical unification and simplification: with a small stock of primitives, we can analyze a number of important philosophical notions with a broad range of applications. But the analyses Lewis proposes are adequate only if we accept the thesis that there are a plurality of worlds. Lewis claims that this is a reason to accept the thesis. In his words, «the hypothesis is serviceable, and that is a reason to think that it is true» (p. 3). Thanks are due to Roberto Ciuni for comments on an earlier draft, and for Terence Cuneo and Mark Moyer for discussion.
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Since the pioneering work by Kripke and Montague, the term possible world has appeared in most theories of formal semantics for modal logics, natural languages, and knowledge-based systems. Yet that term obscures many questions about the relationships between the real world, various models of the world, and descriptions of those models in either formal languages or natural languages. Each step in that progression is an abstraction from the overwhelming complexity of the world. At the end, nothing is left but a colorful metaphor for an undefined element of a set W called worlds, which are related by an undefined and undefinable primitive relation R called accessibility. For some purposes, the resulting abstraction has proved to be useful, but as a general theory of meaning, the abstraction omits too many significant features. So much information has been lost at each step that many philosophers, linguists, and psychologists have dismissed model-theoretic semantics as irrelevant to the study of meaning. This article examines the steps in the process of extracting the pair (W,R) from the world and the way people talk about the world. It shows that the Kripke worlds can be reinterpreted as part of a Peircean semiotic theory, which can also include contributions from many other studies in cognitive science. Among them are Dunn's semantics based on laws and facts, the lexical semantics preferred by many linguists, psychological models of how the world is perceived, and philosophies of science that relate theories to the world. A full integration of all those sources is far beyond the scope of this article, but an outline of the approach suggests that Peirce's vision is capable of relating and reconciling the competing sources.
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The traditional Lewis-Stalnaker semantics of counterfactuals suffers from the problem of counterpossibles: Many counterpossibles seem non-trivially true or false, but the Lewis-Stalnaker semantics deems all counterpossibles trivially true. Many proposed solutions to this problem center around the use of impossible worlds, where necessary falsehoods can be true. Ersatzists have commonly identified impossible worlds with maximal, inconsistent sets of sentences. However, Jens Christian Bjerring (2013) has recently argued that the extended Lewis-Stalnaker semantics delivers the wrong truth values for some counterpossibles if all impossible worlds are maximal. To remedy this defect, Bjerring considers two alternative world ontologies: one in which impossible worlds correspond to arbitrary (maximal or non-maximal) inconsistent sets of sentences, and another in which impossible worlds correspond to (maximal or non-maximal) sets of sentences that are deductively closed in some non-classical logic. Bjerring raises a worry about the former alternative and therefore prefers the latter. In this paper, I argue that Bjerring’s worry about the former alternative is based on a conflation of two distinct conceptions of what it means for a logic to be true in a world. I also argue that the latter alternative does not allow for impossible worlds to be sufficiently logically ill-behaved. I conclude that this tips the balance in favour of the former world ontology.
Are there possible worlds? Lewis and Everett on the plurality of worlds.
In the last few decades after having a remarkable career in science-fiction literature possibleworlds and parallel-universes talk became a respectable and useful tool in many areas of philosophical and physical investigations and explanations. In this study I attempt to show the followings.
Is a possible-worlds semantics of modality possible? A problem for Kratzer's semantics
Proceedings of SALT, 2011
On the methodology of possible worlds semantics, I: Correspondence theory
Notre Dame journal of formal logic, 1988
Though possible worlds semantics has long been established as the dominant research tradition in philosophical logic and its applications, its various theories, background assumptions, and norms have seldom been systematically investigated from a methodological point of view. By way of illustration, consider the matter of semantic adequacy. When a new or revised logical system is proposed, the first and often the only significant 'test' to which it is subjected is that of "completeness": Can the logic be shown to be complete with respect to a suitable semantics? Providing the system has a minimum of intrinsic interest, an affirmative answer to this question is virtually a ticket to 'official' recognition, while even incomplete systems of no intrinsic interest whatsoever may acquire, in virtue of their incompleteness, a kind of rarity value in the catalogue of logics. In short, (in)completeness proofs are the mainstay of many a journal article and provide the meat of many logic textbooks. If completeness is genuinely to represent a criterion of internal adequacy, and not merely a logical nicety, we must ask ourselves exactly what cash-value a complete semantics possesses. This question leads naturally to a further problem. Given a well-defined model theory and appropriate rules of interpretation, the matter of completeness is a factual (or better a logical) one, to be settled by formal analysis. But if we are considering logical semantics in general, or one tradition like that of possible worlds in particular, the question is no longer purely logical: it contains a methodological component and can be answered only on the basis of adopting certain conventions. To prove completeness we may need recourse to some nonstandard interpretation of the logical constants, or to some alternative specification of the intended 'models'. Consequently, issues of the following sort arise: Within what limits are we free to modify the stan-*Parts of an earlier version of this paper were presented at the 5th Finnish-Soviet Logic Symposium held in Tampere, Finland, May 1987. For helpful comments on the earlier draft we are grateful to Johan van Benthem and Ingmar Porn.
Impossible Worlds and Propositions - The Philosophical Quarterly
The Philosophical Quarterly, 2010
Accounts of propositions as sets of possible worlds have been criticized for conflating distinct impossible propositions. In response to this problem, some have proposed to introduce impossible worlds to represent distinct impossibilities, endorsing the thesis that impossible worlds must be of the same kind; this has been called the parity thesis. I show that this thesis faces problems, and propose a hybrid account which rejects it: possible worlds are taken as concrete Lewisian worlds, and impossibilities are represented as set-theoretic constructions out of them. This hybrid account (1) distinguishes many intuitively distinct impossible propositions; (2) identifies impossible propositions with extensional constructions; (3) avoids resorting to primitive modality, at least so far as Lewisian modal realism does.
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