The most commonly heard proposals for reducing possible worlds to language succumb to a simple cardinality argument: it can be shown that there are more possible worlds than there are linguistic entities provided by the proposal. In this paper, I show how the standard proposals can be generalized in a natural way so as to make better use of the resources available to them, and thereby circumvent the cardinality argument. Once it is seen just what the limitations are on these (...) more general proposals, it can be clearly seen where the real difficulty lies with any attempt to reduce possible worlds to language. Roughly, the difficulty is this: no actual language could have the descriptive resources needed to represent all the ways things might have been. I conclude by arguing that this same difficulty spells doom for any nominalist or conceptualist proposal for reducing possible worlds. (shrink)

This book is a defense of modal realism; the thesis that our world is but one of a plurality of worlds, and that the individuals that inhabit our world are only a few out of all the inhabitants of all the worlds. Lewis argues that the philosophical utility of modal realism is a good reason for believing that it is true.

This book, one of the first full-length studies of the modalities to emerge from the debate to which Saul Kripke, David Lewis, Ruth Marcus, and others are contributing, is an exploration and defense of the notion of modality de re, the idea that objects have both essential and accidental properties. Plantinga develops his argument by means of the notion of possible worlds and ranges over such key problems as the nature of essence, transworld identity, negative existential propositions, and the existence (...) of unactual objects in other possible worlds. He also applies his logical theories to the elucidation of two problems in the philosophy of religion: the problem of evil and the ontological argument. (shrink)

An exchange between Patrick Grim and Alvin Plantinga regarding Cantorian arguments against the possibility of an omniscient being.

In his paper "Are There Set Theoretic Possible Worlds?", Selmer Bringsjord argued that the set theoretic definition of possible worlds proffered by, among others, Robert Adams and Alvin Plantinga is incoherent. It is the purpose of this note to evaluate that argument. The upshot: these set theoretic accounts can be preserved, but only by abandoning the power set axiom.

Actualists who believe in possible worlds typically regard them as "abstract" objects of some special sort. For example, Alvin Plantinga takes worlds to be maximal possible states-of-affairs, all of which "exist", as actualism requires, but only one of which "obtains". Views like Plantinga's run into difficulty in the interpretation of statements of "iterated" modality, statements about what is "possible" for individuals that "could" exist but that do not actually exist. These statements seem to require the existence of "singular" states-Of-affairs that (...) have nonactual individuals as constituents, a requirement that is incompatible with actualism. One can try to avoid the troublesome singular states-of-affairs by introducing "unexemplified individual essences" and maintaining that these are the true constituents of the required states-of-affairs, rather than the nonactual possibles themselves. However, serious arguments are raised against this employment of individual essences. (shrink)

Counterfactuals is David Lewis' forceful presentation of and sustained argument for a particular view about propositions which express contrary to fact conditionals, including his famous defense of realism about possible worlds and his theory of laws of nature.

"[This book] proposes new foundations for the Bayesian principle of rational action, and goes on to develop a new logic of desirability and probabtility."—Frederic Schick, _Journal of Philosophy_.

A Cantorian argument that there is no set of all truths. There is, for the same reason, no possible world as a maximal set of propositions. And omniscience is logically impossible.

Analytic philosophy has recently demonstrated a revived interest in metaphysical problems about possibility and necessity. Graeme Forbes here provides a careful description of the logical background of recent work in this area for those who may be unfamiliar with it, moving on to d discuss the distinction between modality de re and modality de dicto and the ontological commitments of possible worlds semantics. In addition, Forbes offers a unified theory of the essential properties of sets, organisms, artefacts, substances, and events, (...) based on the doctrine that identity facts must be intrinsically grounded, and analyzes and rejects apparent counterexamples to this doctrine. (shrink)

This is an exploration of a cluster of related logical results. Taken together these seem to have something philosophically important to teach us: something about knowledge and truth and something about the logical impossibility of totalities of knowledge and truth. The book includes explorations of new forms of the ancient and venerable paradox of the :Liar, applications and extensions of Kaplan and Montague's paradox of the Knower, generalizations of Godel's work on incompleteness, and new uses of Cantorian diagonalization. Throughout, the (...) concern is with metaphysical and epistemological implications of these results: what such results may have to teach us about knowledge, truth, and possibility. (shrink)