The Actuality Story

Chance and Actuality

The relation between chance and actuality gives rise to the following puzzle. On the one hand, it may be a chancy matter what will actually happen. On the other hand, standard semantics for ‘actually’ imply that sentences beginning with ‘actually’ are never contingent. In order to elucidate this puzzle, a kind of objective semantic indeterminacy will be defended: in a chancy world, it may be a ...

Actuality Entailments *

The term ‘actuality entailment’ was coined by Rajesh Bhatt in his 1999 dissertation to describe the implicative inference that arises when ability modals combine with perfective aspect. This article investigates the nature of this inference and the contributions of aspect and modality, by surveying the environments in which it is found. Prior to Bhatt’s dissertation, the literatures on aspect a...

Modal Meinongianism and Actuality

Modal Meinongianism is the most recent neo-Meinongian theory. Its main innovation consists in a Comprehension Principle which, unlike other neo-Meinongian approaches, seemingly avoids limitations on the properties that can characterize objects. However, in a recent paper A. Sauchelli has raised an objection against modal Meinongianism, to the effect that properties and relations involving refer...

Counterparts and Actuality

Actuality and Responsibility

Actual-sequence views of responsibility are views according to which moral responsibility is a function of actual sequences, histories, or ancestries. In recent years these views have acquired much popularity as an attractive kind of compatibilist answer to the problem of determinism and the freedom of the will. But what does it mean to say that responsibility is ‘a function of the actual seque...