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Possible Worlds and Annstrong's Combinatorialism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Jaegwon Kim
Jaegwon Kim*
Affiliation:
The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI48109, U.S.A.
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Extract

At the outset of his instructive and thought-provoking paper, ‘The Nature of Possibility,’ Professor David Armstrong gives a succinct description, in itself almost complete, of his ‘combinatorial theory’ of possibility. He says: ‘Such a view traces the very idea of possibility to the idea of the combinations - allthe combinations which respect certain simple form- of given, actual elements’ (575). We can perhaps start a bit further back than this. In explaining the idea of a ‘possible world,’ some philosophers begin with the idea of ‘things being a certain way’ or ‘the way things are.’ From this idea a leap is made to ‘things might have been a certain other way’ or ‘ways things could have been.’ And here we already have possible worlds, or so some philosophers assure us: David Lewis, for example, says his talk of possible worlds is nothing but a ‘permissible paraphrase’ of this familiar and innocent-sounding locution, ‘ways things could have been.'

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 16 , Issue 4 , December 1986 , pp. 595 - 612
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1986

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References

1 Canadian Journal of Philosophy 16, 4, 575-94. (Textual references to this paper will be given within parentheses in the main text.) The present paper is a revised version of the comments presented on Armstrong's paper at the Chapel Hill Colloquium in Philosophy in October, 1985. I have benefited from discussions with Paul Boghossian and Brian McLaughlin.

2 I believe I first heard John Pollock use this expression.

3 The expression comes from Lewis, David Counterfactuals (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1973), 84.Google Scholar

4 Ibid.

5 See Chisholm, Roderick M. The First Person (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1981),Google Scholar ch. 2 and Appendix.

6 This makes one wonder what ‘existence’ exactly could mean for universals.

7 Notice an interesting asymmetry: If a does not have F, there is no world here. For a's not having F (or a's having not-f) is not a molecular state of affairs. This would mean, I assume, the following must hold: every simple individual must have at least one simple property.

8 See, e.g., Kripke, Saul Naming and Necessity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1972);CrossRefGoogle Scholar Putnam, Hilary ‘The Meaning of “Meaning”’ reprinted in his Mind, Language, and Reality: Philosophical Papers, Vol.2 (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge Unviersity Press 1975).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

9 See below for why combinations and recombinations must be done ‘mechanically’ or ‘algorithmically.’

10 For some relevant points concerning this see Goodman, Nelson The Structure of Appearance, 2nd ed. (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill 1966)Google Scholar, ch. III.

11 See William Lycan's excellent survey and discussion of the various approaches to the analysis of possible worlds, ‘The Trouble with Possible Worlds’ in Loux, Michael J. ed., The Possible and the Actual (Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1979), esp. 302ff.Google Scholar

12 Ibid.

13 I am not even sure this is true. I am not sure that within Armstrong's actualist scheme there can be a true reading of statements of the form ‘There is a fictional world w such that …’.

14 One possible conclusion to draw, therefore, is that we should give up talk of possible worlds to explain modalities.