This sociological claim that most philosophers who talk about possible worlds take this talk to be analogous to talk of e.
In any case, fictionalism about possible worlds might be important even if the descriptive version is incorrect. A normative claim to the effect that talk of possible worlds ought to be interpreted as merely fictional discourse, or the corresponding strong fictionalist claim that modal statements ought to be reinterpreted so as to be explained or analysed as statements about the content of the fiction of possible worlds, might be found attractive even if it were conceded that most people who employed the discourse were not talking fictively, or that the actual commitments of the folk and most philosophers who employ everyday modal idiom are to be cashed out in some other way e.
The two questions, of whether the fictionalist theory is supposed to describe our current practice, and whether it is supposed to describe a practice we should adopt instead of realism, are independent. Two people could agree that normal usage of possible-worlds talk is not intended literally, but disagree about whether we should accept the literal existence of possible worlds that is, they could be descriptive fictionalists while disagreeing about the normative question , and likewise two people could be normative fictionalists, and claim that we should take ordinary possible worlds talk as being only fictionally true or appropriate, while disagreeing about whether in fact current usage reflects this fictionalism or instead reveals non-fictionalist commitments among the users of the vocabulary.
Unfortunately, modal fictionalists have often not been explicit about whether their theory is to be an analysis of the possible-worlds talk and perhaps modal discourse which is actually employed, or a normative suggestion about how we might move to a superior theory.
It is to be hoped that those seeking to provide a fully worked out modal fictionalist position would make more explicit the status of their proposal. So far, it has been taken for granted that the modal fictionalist treats ordinary modal claims as sometimes literally true, and it is only claims about possible worlds and their contents which the modal fictionalist will wish to claim are literally false, but true according to a story.
A more radical modal fictionalism is possible: one in which modal claims themselves such as the claim that there could have been blue swans, or that necessarily, everything is self-identical are not literally true, but only true according to a fiction.
In Nolan a I called a version of modal fictionalism which took both claims about possible worlds and modal claims to be true only according to fictions broad modal fictionalism.
Such extended fictionalism about modality could, I think, come in two main varieties. One would maintain that modal operators and associated pieces of language like essential predication, counterfactual conditionals, and perhaps other things like assignments of probabilities lacked literal application: that all statements prefixed with a modal operator were either uniformly literally truthvalueless or uniformly literally false.
This faces several immediate formal difficulties, given the usual characterisation of the modal operators. This fictionalist about modality might reject the literal truth of all claims about necessity, for example and, in virtue of the interdefinition, accept the literal truth of all possibility claims.
Or she might assert as little as is needed to preserve the basic modal inferences from actuality: for example, every true P is possibly true, and actually true, but this is the limit of literal modal truth. This would be more analogous to the fictionalist about possible worlds who nevertheless thinks that there is one possible world — the actual, and one collection of possible objects — the actual objects. Fictionalism of this sort extending to modal discourse as well should be a position worthy of investigation by those attracted to fictionalist strategies and mistrustful of modality.
Since it seems to lack contemporary advocates, however, it shall not be dwelled upon here. Modal fictionalism has traditionally been conceived as fictionalism about possible worlds, and implicitly also about their contents. One natural way to extend modal fictionalism so understood is to admit impossible worlds as well. Use of a fiction of impossible worlds is unlikely to seem too extravagant for many modal fictionalists, but it might also provide a mechanism for non-fictionalists about possible worlds to talk of impossible worlds without the extra theoretical costs they fear.
So there is a partially fictionalist option of being a realist of some stripe about possible worlds but a fictionalist about impossible worlds and perhaps other situations, e. This partial fictionalism will face some of the same sorts of questions, and employ the same sorts of strategies, as modal fictionalism about possible worlds.
By far the majority of realists about possible worlds take them to be abstract objects of some sort: sets of sentences or propositions, uninstantiated world-properties, or unactualised maximal facts, or perhaps even as sui generis simples.
However, their approach to merely possible objects is often less explicitly spelled out. As well as possible worlds, merely possible objects such as blue swans, my counterparts, Newtonian masses, XYZ, and many others are discussed and quantified over. Some abstractionists will wish to identify such merely possible objects with actual abstract objects — perhaps uninstantiated properties that are less than world-properties, descriptions of parts of worlds, set-theoretic representatives, or whatever.
But many more will not. This is for at least three reasons. The first is the intuition, never entirely quelled, that a merely possible blue swan should be blue and a swan.
Abstract objects are rarely, if ever, either. The second is that it is often thought that the whole point about merely possible objects is that they do not exist, but might have.
Admitting their literal existence by identifying them with actual existing abstract objects will go against the grain for many. Finally, many theories of possible worlds lack obvious candidates to play the roles of merely possible objects. Fictionalism about merely possible objects is an underappreciated theory, and should perhaps recommend itself to more abstractionists about possible worlds than it in fact does. A theory that holds that possible worlds are to be treated as having the status of fictional objects immediately gives rise to questions about the status of fictions and fictional objects more generally.
One might wish to do this, for example, if one thought that paradigmatic story-telling consisted of utterances that were not truth-apt not anyway through the same mechanism as ordinary utterances , while claims about, say, ideal gases were better construed as standard sorts of assertions that were literally false. In practice, however, recent modal fictionalism discussions have proceeded as if the theory holds that possible worlds are fictional in the fullest sense of the word.
The ontological status of fictions is an important issue to settle if we are to determine whether modal fictionalism is any advance metaphysically on rival realist theories of possible worlds. On pain of circularity, the ontology of fiction, as conceived by the fictionalist, had best not include possible worlds as the ontology of fiction offered in Lewis does , but there are other sources of concern.
Rosen points out that fictionalists must believe in fictions, stories, theories, or somesuch, and that if these are construed as abstract objects, they will not be philosophically uncontroversial Rosen , p.
Rosen argues that belief in abstract objects like stories and theories is less revisionary than belief in Lewisian possible worlds, at least. However, it is hardly clear that an ontology of abstract representational entities is any more or less objectionable than the ontology of abstractionist theories of possible worlds.
Lycan , p. This approach is not problem-free either see section 4 : it is far from clear that it will serve as a basis for paradigm fictions, let alone be enough to explain possible worlds. There are a variety of technical objections to modal fictionalism, and if these objections succeeded they would derail specific proposals like that of Rosen and perhaps cause difficulties for modal fictionalism in general.
In the case of Rosen , a variety was also leveled at the fictionalism of Armstrong The reader is advised to consult Brock and Rosen for an exact statement of their objections, but in essence the problem arises when we consider the modal status of certain claims about possible worlds themselves.
One of the principal fictionalist biconditionals, as we have seen, is the biconditional connecting necessary truths and what the fiction asserts about all possible worlds:. According to the fiction employed by Rosen i.
Furthermore, this claim is true at any of these possible worlds. So, according to the modal fiction, at all worlds it is true that there are many other possible worlds. However, it follows from the biconditional that since, according to the modal fiction, at all worlds, there are many possible worlds, it follows that necessarily, there are many possible worlds.
Since necessarily P implies P , it follows that there are literally! But the whole point of modal fictionalism was to deny or at least avoid asserting that there were many possible worlds. So modal fictionalism, at least of the variety described, is self-refuting.
So the objection goes. Two direct responses have been offered to this problem in the literature. Ignoring for our purposes the complications which need to be introduced if we are to add accessibility relations between worlds, the Lewis equivalent of 2 is. Instead of the simpler biconditionals discussed near the beginning of this entry and in Rosen , the revised proposal is to take equivalences asserted by Lewis between modal claims and claims couched in terms of quantification over possible worlds, and treat those equivalences instead as specifying connections between modal statements and claims about what is true according to the fiction.
If a modal claim is literally true, its associated world-claim is true according to the fiction, and vice versa. How best to respond to the Brock-Rosen objection continues to be a matter for debate: both Liggins and Woodward offer alternatives for the modal fictionalist. A modal fictionalist who maintains the version outlined in Rosen believes that the fiction of possible worlds PW is not literally true. A question arises about the modal status of the fiction: is it necessarily false, or contingently false?
In either case, Hale argues, the modal fictionalist is in trouble. A modal fictionalist might try to resist either horn of the dilemma.
On the first horn, modal fictionalists might employ another gloss on what it is to be true according to PW, or they might endorse one of the various theories of conditionals on which conditionals with necessarily false antecedents are not automatically true.
A third option, explored by Rosen , is not to take PW to be false, but rather altogether lacking a truth-value — e. Rosen and Divers b are among the responses to Hale, and Hale has in turn responded to Rosen in Hale a, where Hale argues that several of the responses suggested by Rosen in turn face serious problems.
In addition to the technical challenges facing modal fictionalism outlined in the previous section, modal fictionalism has been challenged on a number of less technical grounds. Not all of these challenges are equally cogent against every variety of modal fictionalism, and some explicitly have as their targets only some versions of the doctrine.
Fictions are human products: they have authors, and those authors have a good deal of control over what is true according to them though exactly how much control is controversial. Not any old story told about possible worlds will serve as the modal fiction, at least if it is to provide the heuristic and other advantages of talk about possible worlds.
Modal fictionalists can certainly respond to the more general worry that fictionalism makes it too arbitrary which particular story about possible worlds ought to be employed. Even if there are substantial constraints on what story will be adequate, and these constraints are not due merely to facts about us or our choices, there may still be some scope for the story to be artificial to a small degree, for some points of detail may be left underdetermined by the constraints.
This may also be considered a problem, but it is unlikely to be fatal. There is a more specific worry that remains even if a suitable account of what constraints there are on the modal fiction can be given. This is that it is too contingent a matter whether there is a modal fiction at all. After all, if there had never been any sentient creatures, no stories would ever have been told, and even if the modal fiction is construed as a Platonic entity a collection of propositions, perhaps , it may never have been a fiction if it was never expressed by story-tellers.
Of course if nothing hangs on whether or not it is a fiction, then this will not worry the Platonist modal fictionalist. This worry, again, is particularly pressing if modal truth is to depend on the contents of the fiction, since it does not seem that whether or not blue swans are possible, for example, depends on whether or not anyone ever told stories.
There are responses to this worry, and responses to these responses: see Nolan a, Kim or Dombrovszki Sauchelli is a recent contribution to this debate that points out another aspect of the problem about artificiality, especially for a fictionalist who intends an analysis of modal claims in terms of a fiction of possible worlds.
Many people at different times and in different places have made modal claims: Sauchelli mentions the example of Caesar considering whether he could cross the Rubicon.
Most people have little or no contact with fictions of possible worlds, or theories of possible worlds intended to be factual but useable as fictions. Those people lack access to the fictions that are supposed to underpin the truth of their modal claims. Sauchelli claims this makes for both an implausible modal epistemology for figures like Caesar and an implausible account of how people like Caesar can even understand modal claims. That paper contains a response to this artificiality objection on pp.
Fictions are often incomplete: they are silent about some issues. Arguably, the modal fiction will be incomplete too: there will be some propositions such that neither they nor their negations will be true according to the fiction.
This prospect raises several worries. There are some modal issues and corresponding issues about the nature of possible worlds that a realist may well be silent on: not because they believe there is no answer, but rather because they believe themselves ignorant of the answer. So it might appear for the fictionalist there is not an unknown modal fact — either the claim is false because the corresponding worlds-claim is not true according to the fiction, or something involving a truth-value gap is going on.
Rosen also discusses what effect this might have on modal claims corresponding to such silences. A detailed discussion and critique of Rosen on this issue can be found in the following supplementary document:. What is uncontentious is that modal fictionalists operating with fictions which are incomplete in the way, e. Woodward offers an approach that ensures modal claims are indeterminate in truth value when the fiction of possible worlds is apparently silent about corresponding questions about possible worlds, through offering a treatment of the fiction on which it is indeterminate what the fiction itself represents in these cases.
Skiba criticises both the approach taken in the note above and the approach Woodward offers, and suggests one way out for the modal fictionalist is to endorse apparently contradictory sentences that threaten to follow, but to treat these apparent contradictions as only apparent, since under analysis the modal sentences that appear to contradict each other really express compatible propositions about the modal fiction.
This is also a worry that the modal fiction will not represent as much as is desirable, though the concern is not confined to those areas in which realists might confess ignorance. A modal fiction, to be adequate, must represent a very great deal about possible worlds, since there are infinitely many claims about possible worlds that must be part of the content of the fiction, if there are to be enough possible-worlds claims to correspond to all the modal claims we would accept.
Only a tiny proportion of the propositions about possible worlds needed will be able to be stated explicitly by the modal fictionalist: constraints of time and space and publication costs will mean that the fictionalist will need to describe the fictional worlds in only a few volumes, while an exhaustive explicit description of even a single possible world as complex as our actual world is beyond our finite resources.
What modal fictions will presumably have, however, are generalisations about possible worlds: for instance, principles of recombination and plenitude, principles about what truths are respected by all worlds, and so on. The modal fictionalist might reasonably hope that these generalisations imply all of the specific claims needed by the fiction.
It seems that a strong modal fictionalist will be stuck with a radically incomplete fiction, if he relies only on what his modal fiction explicitly says, or he faces the task of specifying the implicit content of the modal fiction without recourse to modal notions like implication.
A strong modal fictionalist could attempt to capture non-explicit content in ways that did not rely on modal resources: one way this could be attempted would be to offer a syntactic account or some other non-modal account of some sort of consequence relation, and to stipulate that the fiction is to be considered closed under the relation thus specified.
So the strong modal fictionalist faces a serious challenge in providing a fiction capable of representing what is needed for his theory to be adequate.
An essential part of an adequate modal fictionalist theory is a specification of the fiction of possible worlds which is to be employed. As well as selecting one of the many potential candidate stories about worlds, it is also essential to provide an explanation and justification of the choice. This is very rarely done by modal fictionalists Armstrong provides an exception. This is not to say that it cannot be done, or cannot be done plausibly: but justifying the choice of fiction is not something that can be neglected if a modal fictionalist theory is to be convincing.
Christopher Peacocke Peacocke , p. As with so many other challenges, timid modal fictionalism can immediately provide the outlines of an answer to this question.
Though it is to be remembered that timid modal fictionalism is able to avoid so many theoretical difficulties only because the fiction is not asked to do much theoretical work. If the truths of possibility and necessity and conditionality, and other modal truths obtain without dependence on the content of the modal fiction, it is surely reasonable to suppose that whichever fiction it is correct to employ, it must respect those independently obtaining modal truths.
Strong modal fictionalists must also ensure that the contents of the fiction are associated with the modal claims they wish to make in the appropriate way, of course, but this will be of less help to them in establishing the content of the modal fiction. For if the content of the modal fiction is to explain the truth of the modal claims, it must be able to be fixed independently, on pain of circularity.
This is especially so if the strong modal fictionalist holds, as one well might, that it is our understanding of the modal fiction that provides perhaps implicitly our epistemic access to which modal claims are true and which false. Giving a non-circular specification of the content of the modal fiction is one of the very difficult challenges facing the strong modal fictionalist.
While strong modal fictionalists cannot appeal to an independently constituted body of modal truths, one thing they can do is insist that the modal fiction respect our ordinary modal judgments : that is, that by and large if we accept a modal claim as true, the associated claim involving possible worlds will be true according to the modal fiction.
Rosen , p. This is presumably not to forbid any departures from our pre-theoretic modal judgements, should they be required, but it would provide a way even for the strong fictionalist to rule out gratuitous departures from our modal opinions. The next obvious source of content for the modal fiction is the literal truth about our actual world Rosen , p. It would also seem to be required, for if the fiction fails to be committed to the actual world verifying a certain non-modal truth q , the inference from q to Actually- q and back will be jeopardised.
Some particular non-modal truths may prove especially useful: Armstrong , pp. As well as conformity with our pre-theoretic modal judgements and inclusion of an encyclopedia of actual non-modal truths, Rosen mentions another source of information to apply in specifying the modal fiction. We have practices of forming modal beliefs involving imagining situations in accord with principles of recombination, non-arbitrariness, and so on p.
Rosen points out that while a realist has the challenge of explaining why this practice of imagining should be a guide to modal truth, the fictionalist need not face this challenge if those practices are part of the process of constructing the fiction of possible worlds.
If the constraints, or limits, on our imaginative practices when considering hypothetical situations are vital in our practice of making many of our modal judgements, it would make sense to similarly constrain the modal fiction. There are no doubt many other sorts of constraints which a modal fictionalist may appeal to in order to narrow down the class of fictions about possible worlds which are acceptable for her purposes. Even after all of these constraints are in place, however, there may still be the theoretical possibility that more than one fiction about possible worlds complete or incomplete satisfies them equally well.
A fictionalist facing a choice between equally deserving fictions would need to address the issue of what attitude to take to other modal fictionalists who choose differently. Should they be judged incorrect? Correct, because judgements about the content of the modal fiction are relative to which acceptable fiction is adopted? Or should they be judged to be talking about something else? Or perhaps the fictionalist could find some way to avoid making the choice of one single fiction.
Woodward explores one way to avoid making this choice: he suggests modifying the fictionalist biconditional to relate modal claims to a range of acceptable fictions, allowing for some truth-value gaps when the acceptable fictions diverge from each other. This is only possible if the modal truths themselves are not being appealed to as constraints on acceptable fictions, so is not a problem which faces the timid modal fictionalist.
If the constraints are not enough to uniquely determine the truth-value of every modal claim, then not only the determinacy of the content of the fiction but the determinacy of the truth-value of some modal claims is at stake.
Are those modal claims true or false, or neither? Might they be fiction-relative, so there are no-fault disagreements about them?
This is not the place to attempt to settle the matter of whether constraints are likely to uniquely determine a modal fiction, nor whether it would be genuinely objectionable if they did not do so. Rather, the issues are mentioned as ones to be kept in mind when formulating or defending a modal fictionalist theory. Different theories of the same subject matter will often take different resources to be primitive, and while it is a difficult question to decide whether one set of primitives is better or worse than another, evaluation of the relative simplicity, naturalness, or other merits of theoretical primitives is part of the evaluation of rival theories.
This sort of comparison can can be especially relevant in areas where disputes between rival theories are not to be settled easily by experiment or observation. Such disputes make up one of the battlegrounds between fictionalists and their rivals, with anti-fictionalists claiming that the unanalysed theoretical resources which fictionalists rely on render fictionalist theories unattractive, or at least relatively unattractive compared to some rival or other.
This sort of analysis is sometimes known as a reductive analysis. This will only be of concern to some modal fictionalists, of course — timid fictionalists will not have been looking for a reductive analysis of modality based on their fiction in the first place — and some timid fictionalists such as Divers b explicitly endorse modal explanations of the fictionalist operator Divers b, p.
Even timid fictionalism is compatible with a reductionist account of modality, of course, since the timid fictionalist may seek to explain modality in some other terms. It is just that it is not hospitable to reductionist accounts of modality in terms of possible worlds. Rosen points out that one might think that his favoured prefix is a modal locution, and if so even his position cannot be said to entirely reduce the modal in favour of the non-modal Rosen , pp.
Nevertheless, as he points out, it may still be thought to be some theoretical advance to be able to explain all of the other modal notions using only this one. Regardless of its status as a modal locution, Rosen recognizes that it is a very unsatisfying primitive: the notion of a proposition being true according to PW is an unlikely one to be considered basic and unanalysable.
Beyond that, how to settle disputes about the relative attractiveness of primitives is a difficult issue in philosophical methodology. Taking such an apparently complex operator to be unanalysable looks unattractive Nolan a, pp. A better option for the modal fictionalist interested in analysing modality in terms of the modal fiction might be to attempt a non-modal explanation of what is true according to fiction.
In any case, this problem, like many problems for modal fictionalism, does not arise for the timid modal fictionalist. John Divers in Divers argues that modal fictionalism cannot deliver the benefits of the standard possible worlds semantics for modal discourse. Modal fictionalism has attracted a range of other objections and concerns. Some of these can be generalised to other fictionalist projects; some generalise to other approaches to possible worlds; and some seem to rely on specific features of modal fictionalist proposals.
Rather than trying to describe each controversy in detail, I will briefly outline three with some references for those who wish to track down the relevant literature.
In this paper, I develop a new strategy for the fictionalist to pursue in response to the Brock—Rosen objection. I begin by arguing that modal fictionalism is best understood as a paraphrase strategy that concerns the propositions that are expressed, in a given context, by modal sentences. I then argue that the paraphrastic fictionalist can appeal to a form of semantic contextualism in order to communicate her status as an anti-realist.
Analysis, 56, 26—32] are wrong to suggest that the Brock-Rosen objection reveals a structural flaw with all species of fictionalism. Modal Fictionalism in Metaphysics. Ontological Fictionalism in Metaphysics. Edit this record. Mark as duplicate. Find it on Scholar. Request removal from index. Revision history. Download options PhilArchive copy. From the Publisher via CrossRef no proxy link. Configure custom resolver. On the Plurality of Worlds. David Lewis - - Wiley-Blackwell.
Ontological Relativity and Other Essays. Willard van Orman Quine - unknown. Realism, Mathematics and Modality. Hartry Field - - Philosophical Topics 16 1 Hartry H. Field - - Blackwell. Matti Eklund - - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Modal Fictionalism. Daniel Nolan - - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Nihilism Without Self-Contradiction. Parent - - The Monist 96 4 Fictionalism and Incompleteness. Modal Fictionalism: A Response to Rosen. Stuart Brock - - Mind
0コメント