Laws and modal realism

Robert Pargetter

doi:10.1007/bf00372911

Necessitism, Contingentism, and Lewisian Modal Realism

Acta Analytica ◽

10.1007/s12136-021-00479-9 ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Cristina Nencha

Keyword(s):

Natural Language ◽

Common Sense ◽

David Lewis ◽

Modal Realism ◽

Timothy Williamson ◽

Restricted Quantification

AbstractNecessitism is the controversial thesis that necessarily everything is necessarily something, namely that everything, everywhere, necessarily exists. What is controversial about necessitism is that, at its core, it claims that things could not have failed to exist, while we have a pre-theoretical intuition that not everything necessarily exists. Contingentism, in accordance with common sense, denies necessitism: it claims that some things could have failed to exist. Timothy Williamson is a necessitist and claims that David Lewis is a necessitist too. The paper argues that, granted the assumptions that lead to interpret the Lewisian as a necessitist, she can preserve contingentist intuitions, by genuinely agreeing with the folk that existence is contingent. This is not just the uncontroversial claim that the Lewisian, as a result of the prevalence of restricted quantification in counterpart theoretic regimentations of natural language, can agree with the folk while disagreeing with them in the metaphysical room. Rather, this is the claim that it is in the metaphysical room that the Lewisian can endorse the intuitions lying behind contingentism.

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Genuine Modal Realism: Still Limited

Mind ◽

10.1093/mind/fzl731 ◽

2006 ◽

Vol 115 (459) ◽

pp. 731-740 ◽

Cited By ~ 3

Author(s):

John Divers ◽

Joseph Melia

Keyword(s):

Modal Realism ◽

Genuine Modal Realism

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Lewis' Indexical Argument for World-Relative Actuality

Dialogue ◽

10.1017/s001221730001578x ◽

1989 ◽

Vol 28 (2) ◽

pp. 289-304 ◽

Cited By ~ 3

Author(s):

Richard M. Gale

Keyword(s):

David Lewis ◽

Cost Benefit ◽

The Other ◽

Abstract Entity ◽

Modal Realism ◽

Possible World ◽

States Of Affairs ◽

Systematic Analysis ◽

Reductio Ad Absurdum ◽

Critical Scrutiny

David Lewis has shocked the philosophical community with his original version of extreme modal realism according to which “every way that a world could possibly be is a way that some world is”. Logical Space is a plenitude of isolated physical worlds, each being the actualization of some way in which a world could be, that bear neither spatiotemporal nor causal relations to each other. Lewis has given independent, converging arguments for this. One is the argument from the indexicality of actuality, the other an elaborate cost-benefit argument of the inference-to-the-best explanation sort to the effect that a systematic analysis of a number of concepts, including modality, causality, propositions and properties, fares better under his theory than under any rival one that takes a possible world to be either a linguistic entity or an ersatz abstract entity such as a maximal compossible set of properties, propositions or states of affairs. Lewis' legion of critics have confined themselves mostly to attempts at a reductio ad absurdum of his theory or to objections to his various analyses. The indexical argument, on the other hand, has not been subject to careful critical scrutiny. It is the purpose of this paper to show that this argument cannot withstand such scrutiny. Its demise, however, leaves untouched his argument from the explanatory superiority for his extreme modal realism.

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