Recent Work: Modality without Possible Worlds

Abstract

Introducing a recent collection of his papers on modality and tense, Kit Fine writes: It is an oddity of current thinking about modality that it has been heavily influenced, one might say dominated, by two extreme and highly implausible views. The first of these, associated with the name of Quine, is that modal notions are lacking in sense. … The second of these two views, associated with the name of David Lewis, is that the possible and the actual are on an ontological par. Other possible worlds and their inhabitants are just as real the actual world and its inhabitants … . (Fine 2005: 1) Actualists, such as Fine himself, have long aimed to avoid both the Scylla of Quinean scepticism and the Charybdis of Lewisian realism by taking modality to be real, yet exhaustively accounted for by the contents of this, the actual world. Classical actualists have been happy to take modality as a primitive,1 but have been concerned to provide a theory of possible worlds constructed entirely out of the materials of the actual world. In recent years, a different stripe of actualists has emerged. These new actualists, as I shall call them, do not feel the onus of providing an actualist account of possible worlds. Possible worlds, they say, may be a useful formal device in modal logic (as well as in other formal contexts), but they have little to do with the metaphysics of modality. Instead of accounting for possible worlds, then, these theorists seek to provide an account of modality directly; their shared aim is to identify, within the actual world, the grounds, source or truthmaker of modal truths. (Contessa (2009) has called these theorists ‘hardcore actualists’ because, unlike ‘softcore actualists’, they do away entirely with the appeal to possible worlds.)

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 71 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.