Rational Reasons, Counterfactual Statements and “Impossible Worlds” in the Philosophical Justifications of Thought Experiments

In his theory of natural laws David Lewis rejects the authenticity of impossible worlds on the grounds that the contradiction contained within his modifier "in (the world) w" is tantamount to a contradiction in the whole theory, which seems unacceptable. At the same time, in philosophical discourse very often researchers use counterfactual situations and thought experiments with impossible events and objects. There is a need to apply the theory of worlds to genuine, concrete, but impossible worlds. One way to do this is to reject Lewis's classical negation on the grounds that it leads to problems of completeness and inconsistency inside the worlds. The proposed extension for impossibility is compatible with Lewis's extensional metaphysics, although it leads to some loss for description completeness in semantics.

Introduction

Fiction is the ultimate application of the human capacity for displacement—thinking and talking about things beyond the here and now. Fictional characters may live in very remote possible or even impossible worlds. Yet our engagement with fictional stories and characters seems effortless and permeates every aspect of our everyday lives. How is this possible? How does fictional talk relate to assertions about the here and now, or indeed to modal talk about other possible worlds? What is the relation between fiction and mental states like belief and imagination? How does a sequence of fictional statements become a story? What are fictional characters? How do narrators manage to give us access to their characters’ innermost thoughts and desires? This introductory chapter traces the development of various strands of research on these questions within linguistics, narratology, and philosophy in order to lay a foundation for the cutting-edge interdisciplinary work in this volume.

Constructing the Impossible

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.

Reading Strategies and Impossible Worlds in Fiction: With Reference to Lincoln in the Bardo

Postmodern fiction is marked by impossible worlds, the appreciation of which challenges readers and draws upon different cognitive operations. The present study reacts to the reading strategies proposed by Alber, J. 2016. Unnatural Narrative: Impossible Worlds in Fiction and Drama. Lincoln, NB and London: University of Nebraska Press. It adopts and adapts these strategies in a case study of Saunders’s experimental novel, Lincoln in the Bardo (2017). There is an attempt to investigate the cognitive operations that are activated in the process of communicating with and understanding such texts. The study evinces the pros and cons of Alber’s reading strategies. It proposes the cognitive operation of schematization in both online and offline forms as another reading strategy which helps readers understand impossibilities in texts.

Worlds and Meaning

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.