Possible Worlds I: Modal Realism
ثبت نشده
چکیده
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 found its way into linguistics and decision theory. But what are those possible worlds, the entities to which theorists in these disciplines all appeal? Call any attempt to answer this question a theory of possible worlds. This paper sets out and evaluates a leading contemporary theory of possible worlds. The view’s principal proponent is David Lewis, and his label for it is ‘Modal Realism,’ which I will abbreviate ‘MR.’ The view accepts the following systematic correspondence between certain modal facts and facts regarding the existence of possible worlds:
منابع مشابه
Modal Realism with Modal Tense
Modal realists should fashion their theory by postulating and taking seriously the modal equivalent of tense, or modal tense. This will give them a uniform way to respond to five different objections, one each by Skyrms, Quine, and Peacocke, and two by van Inwagen, and suggest a non-Lewisian path to modal realism. 0. Introduction The extensive parallel between temporal logic and modal logic has...
متن کاملAgainst Yagisawa’s Modal Realism
In his book Worlds and Individuals, Possible and Otherwise (2010), Takashi Yagisawa presents and argues for a novel and imaginative version of modal realism. It differs both from Lewis’s modal realism (Lewis 1986) and from actualists’ ersatz accounts (Adams 1974; Sider 2002). Yagisawa draws interesting parallels between tense and modality, and gives a metaphysics of modality which comes close t...
متن کاملIs everything a world?
This paper discusses “inclusionism” in the context of David Lewis’s modal realism (and in the context of parasitic accounts of modality such as John Divers’s agnosticism about possible worlds). This is the doctrine that everything is a world. I argue that this doctrine would be beneficial to Divers-style agnosticism; that it suggests a reconfiguration of the concept of actuality in modal realis...
متن کاملFrom Possibility to Properties? Or from Properties to Possibility?
This paper contrasts two metaphysical accounts of modality and properties: Modal Realism which treats possible entities as primitive; and Strong Dispositionalism in which metaphysical possibility and necessity are determined by actually existing dispositions or powers. I argue that Strong Dispositionalism loses its initial advantages of simplicity and parsimony over Modal Realism as it is exten...
متن کاملBlackburn on the Ban on Mixed
【Subject Class】Ethics, Meta-Ethics 【Keyword】Moral Realism, Moral Projectivism, Moral Facts, Moral Supervenience, Simon Blackburn 【Abstract】This is a realist response to Blackburn’s version of the explanatory inadequacy of the moral thesis based on the ban on mixed worlds, and to its possible explanatory reductionism version. First, the moral supervenience relationship is made explicit, for the ...
متن کامل