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Beyond the blank stare

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Critique de la theorie realiste des mondes possibles de D. Lewis. Les AA. montrent que l'incredulite que provoque la theorie de Lewis n'est pas une objection contre elle, mais que cette theorie rencontre deux problemes de taille : Lewis ne donne pas de fondement de la distinction entre deux mondes possibles, et doit presupposer des concepts modaux primitifs dans son analyse des modalites. Sa theorie est donc soit triviale, soit circulaire

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... This, then, seems viciously circular. Cf.Bigelow and Pargetter (1987).Content courtesy of Springer Nature, terms of use apply. Rights reserved. ...
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The recognition of striking regularities in the physical world plays a major role in the justification of hypotheses and the development of new theories both in the natural sciences and in philosophy. However, while scientists consider only strictly natural hypotheses as explanations for such regularities, philosophers also explore meta-natural hypotheses. One example is mathematical realism, which proposes the existence of abstract mathematical entities as an explanation for the applicability of mathematics in the sciences. Another example is theism, which offers the existence of a supernatural being as an explanation for the design-like appearance of the physical cosmos. Although all meta-natural hypotheses defy empirical testing, there is a strong intuition that some of them are more warranted than others. The goal of this paper is to sharpen this intuition into a clear criterion for the (in)admissibility of meta-natural explanations for empirical facts. Drawing on recent debates about the indispensability of mathematics and teleological arguments for the existence of God, I argue that a meta-natural explanation is admissible just in case the explanation refers to an entity that, though not itself causally efficacious, guarantees the instantiation of a causally efficacious entity that is an actual cause of the regularity.
... seems unduly restrictive. Bigelow and Pargetter (1987) and Bricker (2001) consider Lewis-worlds which consist of two large lobes of spacetime, connected by a narrow and temporary wormhole. It seems perfectly consistent to suppose that if things had been a little different at earlier times, the wormhole wouldn't have formed at all, so that the thing that is in fact a Lewis-world would have been a fusion of two Lewis-worlds. ...
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1 Some puzzles I'm no modal realist myself, mind, and I don't think you should be either. But it can be important to know how best to do something you have no intention of doing. Modal realism plays a pivotal role in the space of available views about modality: our understanding of that space will be seriously incomplete unless we understand how modal realism can best be made coherent. You probably think that David Lewis has already made it coherent—On the Plurality of Worlds (Lewis 1986: henceforth OPW) stands for many of us as an exemplar of the internal virtues towards which one might aspire in a systematic metaphysics, whatever we may think about the plausibility of the result. I think this judgment needs refining. The book contains the outlines of a marvellously co-herent and elegant (albeit otherwise implausible) account of modality and many other subject matters. But it also contains various bits of doctrine that just don't fit with this picture, including some that might have seemed quite central. My goal in this paper is to track down these aberrant elements and show how the view works once they are eliminated. Let me begin with some puzzles for Lewis. They are not particularly deep: in fact, the correct solution to all three will probably jump out at you long before I have presented it. But they will help us begin to figure out what is really central to the modal realist's analysis of possibility and necessity. While the most general statement of this analysis is a bit compli-cated, its application in some simple cases is supposed to be quite straightforward. For example, we have the following analyses: (1) It is possible that some swans are blue ↔ df there is a Lewis-world such that some swans in it are blue. (2) It is possible that no swans are blue ↔ df there is a Lewis-world such that no swans in it are blue. Here, a Lewis-world is a cosmos: according to Lewis's final analysis, an object none of whose parts bears any "analogically spatiotemporal" relation to anything disjoint from it, and which is not part of any other such object. The symbol '↔ df ' in (1) and (2) is supposed to indicate the giving of an analysis. Perhaps it may be rendered in English as 'For it to be the case that. . . is for it to be the case that. . . '. If we have any grip at all on what it means to give an analysis of something, we know that φ ↔ df ψ entails Necessarily, φ iff ψ . If this is given up, it becomes entirely unclear how the meaning of (1) and (2) go beyond the meaning of the corresponding material biconditionals. 1 So in particular, (1) entails (1): 1 Is φ ↔ df ψ just equivalent to ↔ ψ) ? There is pressure for Lewis to answer yes: it wouldn't be so exciting if one could analyse modality, counterfactuals, etc. in nonmodal terms but still had to take '↔ df ' as a primitive, manifestly non-extensional, operator. If one does answer yes, one will presumably have a pragmatic story to tell about why claims like 'For Socrates to be wise is for Socrates to be wise and not to be a round square' sound wrong.
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This paper proposes a new reductive theory of modality, called the moodless theory of modality. This theory, and not modal realism, is the closest modal analogue of the tenseless theory of time. So, if the tenseless theory is true, and the temporality–modality analogy is good, it is the moodless theory that follows. I also argue that the moodless theory, considered on its own, is better than modal realism: arguments often thought to be decisive against modal realism are weak against it.
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More and more philosophers are using modal notions to solve problems and to analyse concepts. In this introduction to the topic of modality Joseph Melia places his emphasis on a commitment to possible worlds as the best way to understand the nature of necessity. Melia demonstrates how different theories about possible worlds not only influence our more general modal beliefs but illustrate and illuminate various methodological considerations, such as the degree to which any philosophical theory ought to respect common sense. The book begins by introducing readers to various notions of possibility, the de re/de dicto distinction and the ubiquity of our modal concepts. It then presents an accessible introduction to modal logic and possible worlds semantics. Melia argues that by accepting possible worlds into our metaphysics, we can justify such formal semantics, refute Quine's modal scepticism, and make sense of our ordinary thought and talk about the modal. Various theories of possible worlds are critically examined, including David Lewis's extreme realism, Alvin Plantinga's moderate realism, David Armstrong's combinatorialism and the linguistic theory. The book is accessible and engaging throughout and will be welcomed by students looking for a non-technical introduction to a much discussed and contested area of philosophical inquiry.
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Modality is important to philosophy for many reasons. A first reason derives from philosophy's traditional association with logic. Advances in modal logic in the middle of the twentieth century provided a reason to be interested in the modalities. Moreover, propositions that are logically true seem necessarily true. Another source of modality's importance is that necessary truth, according to one tradition, demarcates philosophical from empirical inquiry. Science identifies contingent aspects of the world, whereas philosophical inquiry reveals the essential nature of its objects; philosophical propositions are therefore necessarily true when true at all.
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The goal of the present work is to contribute to the debate over possible worlds. I discuss major realist and anti-realist theories and defend my own version of the view that possible worlds are abstract entities. In Chapter 1 I trace the modern debate to Leibniz' conception of possible worlds. Of particular interest here is Leibniz' famous claim that our world is the best of all possible worlds. I show how difficult it is to interpret such an innocent claim rigourously, and that ultimately it must be judged incoherent with Leibniz' other doctrines. After setting up the formal framework for modal and possible-worlds discourse, I draw the map of the debate. In Chapter 2 I explore David Lewis' 'modal realism' and 'linguistic ersatzism' (henceforth labelled 'C-realism' and 'L-realism' respectively). I address two familiar objections against C-realism and two less familiar ones. In particular, the argument from space casts doubt on the coherence of C-realism given that at least one of C-worlds has an infinite Euclidean space. In the discussion of L-realism I devote particular attention to David Armstrong's reductive account of combinatorial atomism. The difficulties besetting C-realism and L-realism serve to justify the search for a non-reductive account of possible worlds.
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isolated from each other and from our own world; they are not located at any distance from us, nor is there any time at which they will be. And these worlds are every bit as real as the world we think we know--many inhabited by creatures much like ourselves, many others, inhabited by creatures quite different, still others quite barren and desolate. Our world is just one amongst these many, and it is distinguished from the others in relation to ourselves, by nothing more than the fact that it is our world and not someone else's. Is this a price worth paying? Lewis maintains that it is, but he purports to take seriously the charge that it is not, especially if 'the benefits are not worth the cost, because they can be had more cheaply elsewhere'. ~ And so, Lewis sets out to discredit the products of his rivals, who would force genuine modal realism from the market and peddle in its stead some snake- oilish 'ersatz' modal realism. 2 But this is to oversimplify, for the 'ersatzers' have disagreements amongst themselves. The linguistic ersatzers want to sell replicas of worlds built from sets of sentences; the pictorial ersatzers would like to get by with elaborate pictures in place of genuine Lewis- worlds; and the magical ersatzers--the magicians--seek to replace Lewis- worlds with featureless entities, groups of which are 'selected' according to the possibilities being represented. Against the forces of ersatzism Lewis launches a variety of attacks, some
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I start by reconsidering two familiar arguments against modal realism. The argument from epistemology relates to the issue whether we can infer the existence of concrete objects by a priori means. The argument from pragmatics purports to refute the analogy between the indispensability of possible worlds and the indispensability of unobserved entities in physical science and of numbers in mathematics. Then I present two novel objections. One focusses on the obscurity of the notion of isolation required by modal realism. The other stresses the arbitrary nature of the rules governing the behaviour of Lewisean universes. All four objections attack the reductive analysis of modality that is supposed to be the chief merit of modal realism. KeywordsModal realism–Spacetime–Isolation–Contingency–Necessity–David Lewis
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A collection of 13 papers by David Lewis, written on a variety of topics including causation, counterfactuals and indicative conditionals, the direction of time, subjective and objective probability, explanation, perception, free will, and rational decision. The conclusions reached include the claim that time travel is possible, that counterfactual dependence is asymmetrical, that events are properties of spatiotemporal regions, that the Prisoners’ Dilemma is a Newcomb problem, and that causation can be analyzed in terms of counterfactual dependence between events. These papers can be seen as a “prolonged campaign” for a philosophical position Lewis calls “Humean supervenience,” according to which “all there is to the world is a vast mosaic of local matters of particular fact,” with all global features of the world thus supervening on the spatiotemporal arrangement of local qualities.