Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Stalnaker, Robert

Titel

Mere possibilities: metaphysical foundations of modal semantics

Auflage

1

Ort / Verlag

Princeton: Princeton University Press

Erscheinungsjahr

2011

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Alma/SFX Local Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• It seems reasonable to believe that there might have existed things other than those that in fact exist, or have existed. But how should we understand such claims? Standard semantic theories exploit the Leibnizian metaphor of a set of all possible worlds: a proposition might or must be true if it is true in some or all possible worlds. The actualist, who believes that nothing exists except what actually exists, prefers to talk of possible states of the world, or of ways that a world might be. But even the actualist still faces the problem of explaining what we are talking about when we talk about the domains of other possible worlds. In Mere Possibilities, Robert Stalnaker develops a framework for clarifying this problem, and explores a number of actualist strategies for solving it.