Topics in Contemporary Analytic Metaphysics 7th March 2024

Lecture 06 – Modality I: Genuine Modal Realism

1 – Introduction

(Alethic) Modality relates to concepts such as:

 Possibility and necessity.

 What is contingently true versus what is necessarily true.
 What is impossible.
 What an object could do or could be like versus what it must do or must be like…
o … versus what it could not do or could not be like.

It has to do with modes of truth

 Possible truth
 Necessary truth
 Contingent truth
 Etc.

Consider first what is actually true:

 Biden is currently President of the US.

 Texas is not a part of Mexico.
 2 + 2 = 4.
 Snow is white.
 Simon lives in Mexico.
 If Biden is President of the US then Biden is President of the US.
 Either Simon lives in Mexico or he doesn’t.

Consider now what is necessarily true (what has to be the case; what could not have failed to
be the case):

 Biden is currently President of the US.

 Texas is not a part of Mexico.
 2 + 2 = 4.
 Snow is white.
 Simon lives in Mexico.
 If Biden is President of the US then Biden is President of the US.
 Either Simon lives in Mexico or he doesn’t.

Consider now what is only contingently true (what is true but could have been false):

 Biden is currently President of the US.

 Texas is not a part of Mexico.
 2 + 2 = 4.
 Snow is white.

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 Simon lives in Mexico.

 If Biden is President of the US then Biden is President of the US.
 Either Simon lives in Mexico or he doesn’t.

Consider now what is possibly true. This includes:

(i) All contingent truths.

(ii) All necessary truths.
(iii) Things that are actually false but that could have been true.

 Everything from the previous lists, plus e.g.:

 Hillary Clinton is currently President of the US.
 Simon lives in the UK.
 Snow is bright purple.

Note: the intended sense of ‘possibly’ here is not epistemic.

 ‘It is possible that Hillary Clinton is currently President of the US’ is true…
o … because she could have won the election in 2016 and could have been re-
elected in 2020…
o … even though we know that, as a matter of fact, Trump won in 2016 and
Biden won in 2020.
 One way to be clear about this is to note the following equivalence:
o ‘Possibly P’ is equivalent to ‘not necessarily not P’.
o That is, ‘Possibly P’ is equivalent to ‘it is not impossible that P’.

The de dicto vs de re distinction

 De dicto modality involves (very roughly) whether certain sentences are

possibly/necessarily true.
o It is necessary that 2 + 2 = 4.
o It is possible that snow is white.
 De re modality is to do with what is possible or necessary for a particular object.
o I could have bene President of the US.
o Texas could have been a part of Mexico.
o I could not have been a turnip.
o My porcelain mug could not have been made from metal.

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2 – Modal Space and The Big Question

Varieties of possibility1

 Nomological possibility (possibility given the laws of nature)

o It is nomologically impossible for anything to travel faster than the speed of
light.
 Metaphysical possibility (possibility given the ‘laws’ of metaphysics)
o It is (arguably) metaphysically possible for something to travel faster than the
speed of light.
o On the assumption that mereological universalism2 is true, it is (arguably)
metaphysically impossible for composition to fail to occur.
 Logical possibility (does not entail a contradiction)
o It is logically possible that mereological universalism is false.
o It is (arguably) logically impossible that 2 + 2 = 5
o It is (arguably) logically impossible that P  P

Some notation:

 □P =df it is necessary that P

 ◊P =df is is possible that P
 □P =df ◊P =df P is impossible
 □P =df ◊P =df P is contingent

1
The helpful diagram below is taken from Ney (2023) Metaphysics: An Introduction p.279.
2
Mereological universalism: the view that every plurality of objects composes something.

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The Big Question: What is it about reality that makes modal claims true or false?

 What makes ‘□ 2 + 2 = 4’ true?

 What makes ‘◊ Simon lives in the UK’ true?

3 – Lewis’s Answer to The Big Question: Genuine Modal Realism 3

Possible worlds

 Consider the dot labelled ‘actuality’ in the previous diagram.

o That is our world.
o It is one possible world.
 We might imagine lots more dots, representing other ‘possible worlds’.
o Suppose that there is one dot for every complete possible way that the world
could be.
o Some of those possible worlds are nomologically possible
 Some are nomologically impossible but metaphysically possible
 Some are metaphysically impossible but logically possible

Genuine Modal Realism (GMR): possible worlds, so described, are just as real (physical,
concrete, non-abstract, etc.) as the actual world.

 ‘◊P’ is true iff there is a possible world in which ‘P’ is true

 ‘□P’ is true iff ‘P’ is true in all possible worlds

GMR conception of possible worlds:

 Concrete objects4
o Mereological sums of everything that exists at that world.
 Spatio-temporally isolated from other worlds
o But everything within a world is spatio-temporally connected to everything
else in that world.
 So worlds are just mereological fusions of all and only things that are spatio-
temporally related to each other.
o To say that you’re a part of the same possible world as x is just to say that you
bear spatio-temporal relations to x (On the Plurality of Worlds p. 71)
 No possible world is objectively actual
o ‘Actual’ is like ‘here’: it is indexical, and just means ‘the world that I inhabit’.

3
Given a book-length defence in Lewis’s absolute classic (1986) On the Plurality of Worlds.
4
See Bricker (2008) ‘Concrete Possible Worlds’ pp. 112-3 for an attempt to precisify what the concreteness of
possible worlds amounts to.

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Order in the Plurality

 The worlds most similar to our own are said to be ‘close’ or ‘nearby’ worlds
 Less similar worlds to our own are ‘further away’.

The Recombination Principle

 ‘[t]o express the plenitude of possible worlds, I require a principle of recombination

according to which patching together parts of different possible worlds yields another
possible world. Roughly speaking, the principle is that anything can coexist with
anything else, at least provided they occupy distinct spatiotemporal positions.’ (On the
Plurality of Worlds pp. 87-8).5

A reductive account of modality

 Modality is not some mysterious new ingredient in the world.

 It is fully analysed in terms of familiar things: existence, spatiotemporal
connectedness, quantification, mereological fusion etc. 6
o E.g. ‘talking donkeys are possible but not actual’ is analysed as:
 ‘There exists a talking donkey at some possible world (i.e., a
mereological fusion of spatiotemporally connected things) that is not
spatiotemporally connected to me.’

4 – Why Believe Lewis’s GMR?

The famous reaction to Lewis’s GMR is the so-called ‘incredulous stare’

 Even Lewis admits that his view disagrees ‘to an extreme extent, with firm common
sense opinion about what there is’ (On the Plurality of Worlds p. 133).

But (almost) equally famous is his reaction:

 ‘Why believe in a plurality of worlds? Because the hypothesis is serviceable, and that
is a reason to think that it is true […]
 We have only to believe in the vast realm of possibilia and there we find what we
need to advance our endeavours. We find the wherewithal to reduce the diversity of
notions we must accept as primitive, and thereby to improve the unity and economy
of the theory that is our professional concern – total theory, the whole of what we take
to be true. What price paradise? If we want the theoretical benefits that talk of
possibilia brings, the most straightforward way to gain honest title to them it to accept
such talk as the literal truth. It is my view that the price is right […]

5
On pp. 88-90 Lewis refines this principle.
6
You might wonder: doesn’t GMR just give us a reductive account of de dicto modality? What about de re
modality? Lewis also gives a reductive account of de re modality, which is his counterpart theory. We won’t
worry about this for now.

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 The benefits are worth the ontological cost. Modal realism is fruitful; that gives us
good reason to believe that it is true.’ (On the Plurality of Worlds pp. 3-4).

The central argument for GMR, then, is that it promises to do a lot of philosophical work for
us.

 It provides us with reductive analyses of various difficult-to-analyse notions

 It therefore apparently secures a high degree of explanatory power and ideological
parsimony
 Lewis draws a comparison with set theory (On the Plurality of Worlds pp. 3-4).
o We posit a universe of sets because they do so much work for us in
mathematics.
o We posit a ‘universe’ of concrete possible worlds because they do so much
work for us in philosophy.

Some standout analyses/reductions that GMR allows for:

 Modality
o We get a reductive analysis of modal talk.
 Properties
o Class nominalism: properties are sets of their actual and possible instances
 E.g. redness is the set of red things.
 Content/propositions
o A proposition is simply the set of worlds at which that proposition is true.
 Counterfactuals
o Roughly: ‘If it weren’t the case that A, then B would be the case’ is true iff in
the closest possible world in which A isn’t the case, B is the case.
 Causation
o We’ll see the Lewisian analysis of causation in a later week
o For now, note that his analysis relies on GMR.

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5 – Some Objections to GMR

Objection 1: Lewis’s plurality of worlds is extremely ontologically unparsimonious

 Lewis replies that ‘I subscribe to the general view that qualitative parsimony is good
in a philosophical or empirical hypothesis; but I recognise no presumption whatever
in favour of quantitative parsimony’…
o … and that, given that we already believe in one concrete, spatiotemporally
extended world, he is only asking us to ‘believe in more things of that kind,
not in things of some new kind (1973 Counterfactuals p. 87)
 Melia counters that the inhabitants of possible worlds often constitute new kinds. 7
o E.g. Talking donkeys are an extra kind.

Objection 2: GMR says that there are unicorns, but there aren’t!

 Lewis adopts a familiar strategy of quantifier restriction

o In normal circumstances, ‘there are unicorns is false’…
 … because ‘there are’ means ‘there are actually’.

Objection 3: Island Universes

Intuitively, one possible way that things could be is for there to be two disconnected
spacetimes.

But this is impossible, for Lewis’s GMR

 The occupants of each possible world are spatiotemporally related to one another.
 So there is no possible world at which there are two disconnected spacetimes.
 So it is impossible for there to be two disconnected spacetimes.

Lewis tries to show why this result isn’t so bad (On the Plurality of Worlds pp. 71-3).

Bricker tries to alter GMR to accommodate the possibility of disconnected spacetimes. 8

Further Objections

Brief statements of some famous problems can be found in

 https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/possible-worlds/problems-concretism.html

Lewis also considers a range of objections to his view in Chapter 2 (‘Paradox in Paradise’) of
his On the Plurality of Worlds.

7
See Melia (1992) ‘A Note On Lewis’s Ontology’.
8
Bricker (2001) ‘Island Universes and the Analysis of Modality’.

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6 – For Next Week’s Seminar

Read the following excerpts from Lewis (1986) On the Plurality of Worlds (about 31 pages in
total):

 §1.1 ‘The Thesis of the Plurality of Worlds’ (pp. 1-5)

 Some of §1.2 ‘Modal Realism at Work: Modality’ (pp. 5 to the top of p. 13)
 §2.1 ‘Everything is Actual?’ (pp. 97-101)
 §2.4 ‘How Can We Know?’ (pp. 108-115)
 §2.6 The Road to Indifference (pp. 123-128)
 §2.8 ‘The Incredulous Stare’ (pp. 133-5)

Further optional reading:

 Try Bricker’s (2008) ‘Concrete Possible Worlds’ from Contemporary Debates in

Metaphysics if you want more on the topic (I can help if you can’t access).

For questions or doubts, don’t hesitate to email me at [email protected]