Possible-Worlds Semantics for Modal Notions Conceived as Predicates

Possible Worlds Semantics for Predicates

Logically Possible Worlds and Counterpart Semantics for Modal Logic

The paper reviews the technical results from modal logic as well as their philosophical significance. It focuses on possible worlds semantics in general and on the notion of a possible world, of accessibility, and object.

Possible Worlds for Modal Primitivists

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 notio...

Possible Worlds Semantics For Events

Various theories of events or actions have been proposed to account for commonsence conclusions. The typical way in which this proceeds is for a scenario to be invented and a logic tried against it. Then someone else may perturb the scenario a bit and the old logic fails, while a new one may succeed. The basic difficulty with this methodology is its ad hoc character. To overcome this, recent wo...

Agnostic Possible Worlds Semantics

Working within standard classical higher-order logic, we propose a possible worlds semantics (PWS) which combines the simplicity of the familiar Montague semantics (MS), in which propositions are sets of worlds, with the fine-grainedness of the older but less well-known tractarian semantics (TS) of Wittgenstein and C.I. Lewis, wherein worlds are maximal consistent sets of propositions. The prop...