Counterpossible Conditionals

2019 ◽  
pp. 267-290
Author(s):  
Francesco Berto ◽  
Mark Jago ◽  
Rohan French ◽  
Graham Priest ◽  
David Ripley
Keyword(s):  
Impossible Worlds ◽  
Possible World

Vacuism is the view that all counterpossibles are trivially true. There are reasons to think it incorrect. An impossible worlds semantics for counterfactuals is offered, which makes room for non-trivial counterpossibles. One principle which pins down its application is the Strangeness of Impossibility condition: for any given possible world, any impossible worlds is further away from it than any possible world is. A number of Williamson’s objections to the non-vacuist approach are discussed and it is argued that they can be overcome. The question of whether counterfactuals in general should permit the substitution of rigidly coreferential terms is then raised. Having defended non-vacusim against Williamson’s objections, a range of arguments in its favour are considered.

Constructing the Impossible

2021 ◽  
pp. 141-163
Author(s):  
Kit Fine
Keyword(s):  
Natural Language ◽  
Possible Worlds ◽  
Formal Languages ◽  
Impossible Worlds ◽  
Possible World ◽  
Limited Role ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Degree Of Acceptance ◽  
Broad Role ◽  
Natural Way

Please keep the original abstract. A number of philosophers have flirted with the idea of impossible worlds and some have even become enamored of it. But it has not met with the same degree of acceptance as the more familiar idea of a possible world. Whereas possible worlds have played a broad role in specifying the semantics for natural language and for a wide range of formal languages, impossible worlds have had a much more limited role; and there has not even been general agreement as to how a reasonable theory of impossible worlds is to be developed or applied. This chapter provides a natural way of introducing impossible states into the framework of truthmaker semantics and shows how their introduction permits a number of useful applications.

World construction and meaning production in the “impossible worlds” of literature

2008 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria Stefanescu
Keyword(s):  
Modal Logic ◽  
Direct Consequence ◽  
Impossible Worlds ◽  
Possible World ◽  
Meaning Production ◽  
Fictional Worlds

AbstractI examine the implications for literary semantics of the distinction introduced by possible-world literary theorists between world construction and meaning production. I argue that the interdisciplinary borrowings from modal logic have resulted in a tendency among the literary scholars in the field to give preference to the referential dimension of fictional texts over their meaning component. As a direct consequence, the “impossibility” of certain fictional worlds has been diagnosed and assessed in terms of a referential failure. However, although the option to focus on the referential impossibility of some fictional worlds is clearly available to the literary theorist, it may lead to a rather one-sided approach, unless it is counterbalanced by an interest in meaning production in the case of (for the specific purposes of this article) logically inconsistent and/or self-disclosing narratives.

Impossible Worlds

Philosophy ◽  
2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ira Kiourti
Keyword(s):  
Possible Worlds ◽  
Impossible Worlds ◽  
Impossible World ◽  
Possible World ◽  
Accessibility Relation ◽  
Possible World Semantics ◽  
Potential Applicability ◽  
Controversial Topic ◽  
Truth Value ◽  
Modern Work

Impossible worlds constitute an increasingly popular yet controversial topic in logic and metaphysics. The term “impossible worlds” parallels the term “possible worlds” and commonly refers to setups, situations, or totalities (“worlds”) that are inconsistent, incomplete, non-classical, or non-normal in possible-world semantics and metaphysics. These may verify a proposition and its negation, be silent as to the truth value of a proposition, or somehow fail to conform to the (classical) laws of logic. Some authors object to the term “impossible world,” preferring to talk of nonstandard worlds or partial situations instead. While the term “impossible world” is sometimes used to refer to a world that is inaccessible from another relative to some specified accessibility relation, impossible worlds are often conceived of as absolutely impossible in a broadly logical, conceptual, or metaphysical sense. As in the case of possible worlds, modern talk of impossible worlds originates with semantic interpretations of modal and non-classical logics, yet the potential applicability of these worlds to logical, metaphysical, and semantic philosophical puzzles has allowed them to permeate the wider philosophical arena. Arguments for impossible worlds often parallel those for possible worlds (see From Possible Worlds to Impossible Worlds) and focus largely on the proposed applications for such worlds (see Applications). As with possible worlds, there are various metaphysical conceptions of impossible worlds (see the Metaphysics of Impossible Worlds), and objections to such worlds are often theory specific (see Objections to Applications and Objections to Impossible Worlds). This article focuses on modern work on impossible worlds and its critics.

scholarly journals Impossible Worlds

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francesco Berto ◽  
Mark Jago
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
Possible Worlds ◽  
Mental Simulation ◽  
Impossible Worlds ◽  
Logical Necessity ◽  
Possible World ◽  
Fine Grained ◽  
Truth In Fiction ◽  
General Tool ◽  
Open Issues

The latter half of the twentieth century witnessed an ‘intensional revolution’, a great collective effort to analyse notions which are absolutely fundamental to our understanding of the world and of ourselves—from meaning and information to knowledge, belief, causation, essence, supervenience, conditionality, as well as nomological, metaphysical, and logical necessity—in terms of a single concept. This was the concept of a possible world: a way things could have been. Possible worlds found applications in logic, metaphysics, semantics, game theory, information theory, artificial intelligence, and the philosophy of mind and cognition. However, possible worlds analyses have been facing numerous problems. This book traces them all back to hyperintensionality: the need for distinctions more fine-grained than the possible worlds apparatus can easily represent. It then introduces impossible worlds—ways things could not have been—as a general tool for modelling hyperintensional phenomena. The book discusses the metaphysics of impossible worlds and applies them to a range of central topics and open issues in logic, semantics, and philosophy: from the problem of logical omniscience in epistemic logic, to the semantics of non-classical logics, the modelling of imagination and mental simulation, the analysis of information and informative inference, truth in fiction, and counterpossible reasoning.

Worlds and Meaning

2020 ◽  
pp. 242-263
Author(s):  
Timothy Williamson
Keyword(s):  
Impossible Worlds ◽  
Broad Sense ◽  
Possible World ◽  
Logical Constants ◽  
Truth Value

This chapter discusses the possible world framework for intensional semantics, used for the semantics of ‘would’. It does not depend on any particular metaphysics of worlds, but the standard compositional clauses for the logical constants are a significant constraint. Semantic theories which invoke ‘impossible worlds’ flouting those constraints typically turn out to violate the principle of compositionality; since synonymy is not epistemically transparent to speakers, attempts to craft epistemically possible but metaphysically impossible worlds also tend to violate compositionality. Since worlds are best understood as objectively possible, in a broad sense, the proposed semantics makes counterfactuals with metaphysically impossible antecedents vacuously true; appearances to the contrary are an artefact of the suppositional heuristic (similar phenomena are noted for vacuous universal generalizations). This makes trouble for some prominent versions of fictionalist theories in metaphysics and various other philosophical theories which assume that counterpossibles vary in truth-value.

On Shaky Ground? Exploring the Contingent Fundamentality Thesis

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nathan Wildman
Keyword(s):  
Possible World ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Shaky Ground

The relationship between fundamentality and modality remains criminally underexplored. In particular, there are several significant questions about fundamentality’s modal strength that remain unanswered. For example, if something is fundamental is it necessarily so? That is, could something be fundamental in one possible world and derivative in another? And how would the acceptance of contingent fundamentality square with commitments to contingentism (or, for that matter, necessitism) about the existence of the fundamentalia? Chapter 14 makes some headway towards addressing these questions. It does so by exploring the contingent fundamentality thesis, according to which it is possible that something is possibly fundamental and possibly derivative. In this way, the chapter represents a starting point for examining broader issues about the relationship between fundamentality and modality.

scholarly journals Grounding Personal Persistence

2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Harriet E. Baber
Keyword(s):  
Counterpart Theory ◽  
Possible World ◽  
Ordinary Objects ◽  
Plausible Account ◽  
Temporal Properties ◽  
What Matters In Survival ◽  
What Matters

Abstract Modal counterpart theory identifies a thing’s possibly being F with its having a counterpart that is F at another possible world; temporal counterpart theory identifies a thing’s having been F or going to be F, with its having a counterpart that is F at another time. Benovsky, J. 2015. “Alethic Modalities, Temporal Modalities, and Representation.” Kriterion: Journal of Philosophy 29: 18–34 in this journal endorses modal counterpart theory but holds that temporal counterpart theory is untenable because it does not license the ascription of the intuitively correct temporal properties to ordinary objects, and hence that we should understand ordinary objects, including persons, as transtemporal ‘worms’. I argue that the worm theory is problematic when it comes to accounting for what matters in survival and that temporal counterpart theory provides a plausible account of personal persistence.

scholarly journals Appendix to Juhani Yli-Vakkuri's ‘Epistemicism and Modality’

2016 ◽  
Vol 46 (4-5) ◽  
pp. 836-838 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Fritz
Keyword(s):  
Two Dimensional ◽  
Possible World ◽  
Formal Result

AbstractA formal result is proved which is used in Juhani Yli-Vakkuri's ‘Epistemicism and Modality’ to argue that certain two-dimensional possible world models are inadequate for a language with operators for ‘necessarily’, ‘actually’, and ‘definitely’.

Lewis' Indexical Argument for World-Relative Actuality

Dialogue ◽  
1989 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 289-304 ◽  
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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