Theism,possible worlds,and the multiverse

God is traditionally taken to be a perfect being, and the creator and sustainer of all that is. So, if theism is true, what sort of world should we expect? To answer this question, we need an account of the array of possible worlds from which God is said to choose. It seems that either there is (a) exactly one best possible world; or (b) more than one unsurpassable world; or (c) an infinite hierarchy of increasingly better worlds. Influential arguments for atheism have been advanced on each hierarchy, and these jointly comprise a daunting trilemma for theism. In this paper, I argue that if theism is true, we should expect the actual world to be a multiverse comprised of all and only those universes which are worthy of creation and sustenance. I further argue that this multiverse is the unique best of all possible worlds. Finally, I explain how his unconventional view bears on the trilemma for theism.     

Omissions and Preventions as Cases of Genuine Causation

Abstract

Timothy Williamson has defended the claim that any philosophically satisfying conception of modality that encompasses possible worlds semantics (PWS) commits us to the Barcan Formula. His argument depends on the assumption that the domain of what there is (the domain of the actual world) has to be identified with the domain D(@), where @ is the index or possible world that in PWS represents, or stands for, the actual world. I work out an interpretation of the relation between PWS and possible worlds terminology that makes it plausible to reject that assumption.     

Dialetheism and the Impossibility of the World

This paper first offers a standard modal extension of dialetheic logics that respect the normal semantics for negation and conjunction, in an attempt to adequately model absolutism, the thesis that there are true contradictions at metaphysically possible worlds. It is shown, however, that the modal extension has unsavoury consequences for both absolutism and dialetheism. While the logic commits the absolutist to dialetheism, it commits the dialetheist to the impossibility of the actual world. A new modal logic AV is then proposed which avoids these unsavoury consequences by invalidating the interdefinability rules for the modal operators with the use of two valuation relations. However, while using AV carries no significant cost for the absolutist, the same isn't true for the dialetheist. Although using AV allows her to avoid the consequence that the actual world is an impossible world, it does so only on the condition that the dialetheist admits that she cannot give a dialetheic solution to all self-referential semantic paradoxes. Thus, unless there are any further available modal logics that don't commit her to the impossibility of the actual world, the dialetheist is faced with a dilemma. Either admit that the actual world is an impossible world, or admit that her research programme cannot give a comprehensive solution to the self-referential paradoxes.     

Systems of modal logic for impossible worlds

The intuitive notion behind the usual semantics of most systems of modal logic is that of ‘possible worlds’. Loosely speaking, an expression is necessary if and only if it holds in all possible worlds; it is possible if and only if it holds in some possible world. Of course, contradictory expressions turn out to hold in no possible worlds, and logically true expressions turn out to hold in every possible world. A method is presented for transforming standard modal systems into systems of modal logic for impossible worlds. To each possible world there corresponds an impossible world such that an expression holds in the impossible world if and only if it does not hold in the possible world. One can then talk about such worlds quite consistently, and there seems to be no logical reason for excluding them from consideration.     

Quantum Mechanics and the Plight of Physicalism

The literature on physicalism often fails to elucidate, I think, what the word physical in physicalism precisely means. Philosophers speak at times of an ideal set of fundamental physical facts, or they stipulate that physical means non-mental, such that all fundamental physical facts are fundamental facts pertaining to the non-mental. In this article, I will probe physicalism in the very much tangible framework of quantum mechanics. Although this theory, unlike “ideal physics” or some “final theory of non-mentality”, is an incomplete theory of the world, I believe this analysis will be of value, if for nothing else, at least for bringing some taste of physical reality, as it were, back to the debate. First, I will introduce a broad characterization of the physicalist credo. In Sect. 2, I will provide a rather quick review of quantum mechanics and some of its current interpretations. In Sect. 3, the notion of quantum non-separability will be analyzed, which will facilitate a discussion of the wave function ontology in Sect. 4. In Sects. 5 and 6, I will explore competing views on the implications of this ontology. In Sect. 7, I will argue that the prior results, based on a thoroughly realist interpretation of quantum mechanics, support only a weak version of non-reductive physicalism.     

PRIEST AND NAGEL ON BEING SOMEONE: A REFUTATION OF PHYSICALISM

Physicalism entails that a possible world which is a minimal physical duplicate of the actual world be a duplicate simpliciter of the actual world. Because what I really am is not a particular human being, there exists a minimal physical duplicate of the actual world which is not a duplicate simpliciter of the actual world. Therefore, physicalism is false.     

Art as the Silence of the World. An Attempt at a Phenomenological Interpretation

This paper provides an analysis of the paradoxical definition of art as the silence of the world, as presented in Maurice Blanchot’s The Space of Literature. The definition is analysed phenomenologically, by treating the world as the universal horizon of all experiences. The paper presents two possible interpretations of Blanchot’s statement. First, a possibility is considered that, according to Blanchot, in genuine artistic experience the mundane everyday life falls silent, and an autonomous fictional world opens up. The paper argues that while Blanchot does oppose art to everyday life, this interpretation is insufficient. Firstly, because on the basis of the phenomenological premise, all possible worlds fall within the universal world-horizon, and secondly, the function Blanchot attributes to art is considerably more radical, as when he speaks about the directedness of art outside of all possible worlds. While such an aim may seem impossible from the viewpoint of the phenomenological premise, the second part of the paper demonstrates that it can indeed be meaningfully interpreted on the basis of Martin Heidegger’s transcendent approach to the world. According to this interpretation, while the phenomenological premise prevents all discussion of places and experiences outside the world, a liminal experience can nevertheless be discussed. If this is true, it is not an entity within the world which opens up, but rather the world-horizon itself in the form of an anxious silence.     

On the structural similarities between worlds and times

In the debate about the nature and identity of possible worlds, philosophers have neglected the parallel questions about the nature and identity of moments of time. These are not questions about the structure of time in general, but rather about the internal structure of each individual time. Times and worlds share the following structural similarities: both are maximal with respect to propositions (at every world and time, either p or ～p is true, for every p); both are consistent; both are closed (every modal consequence of a proposition true at a world is also true at that world, and every tense-theoretic consequence of a proposition true at a time is also true at that time); just as there is a unique actual world, there is a unique present moment; and just as a proposition is necessarily true iff true at all worlds, a proposition is eternally true iff true at all times. In this paper, I show that a simple extension of my theory of worlds yields a theory of times in which the above structural similarities between the two are consequences.     

The Unique Groundability of Temporal Facts

The A‐theory and the B‐theory advance competing claims about how time is grounded. The A‐theory says that A‐facts are more fundamental in grounding time than are B‐facts, and the B‐theory says the reverse. We argue that whichever theory is true of the actual world is also true of all possible worlds containing time. We do this by arguing that time is uniquely groundable: however time is actually grounded, it is necessarily grounded in that way. It follows that if either the A‐theory or the B‐theory is actually false, then it is necessarily false.     

Can Counterfactuals Really Be about Possible Worlds?

The standard view about counterfactuals is that a counterfactual (A > C) is true if and only if the A‐worlds most similar to the actual world @ are C‐worlds. I argue that the worlds conception of counterfactuals is wrong. I assume that counterfactuals have non‐trivial truth‐values under physical determinism. I show that the possible‐worlds approach cannot explain many embeddings of the form (P > (Q > R)), which intuitively are perfectly assertable, and which must be true if the contingent falsity of (Q > R) is to be explained. If (P > (Q > R)) has a backtracking reading then the contingent facts that (Q > R) needs to be true in the closest P‐worlds are absent. If (P > (Q > R)) has a forwardtracking reading, then the laws required by (Q > R) to be true in the closest P‐worlds will be absent, because they are violated in those worlds. Solutions like lossy laws or denial of embedding won't work. The only approach to counterfactuals that explains the embedding is a pragmatic metalinguistic approach in which the whole idea that counterfactuals are about a modal reality, be it abstract or concrete, is given up.     

Do a Posteriori Physicalists Get Our Phenomenal Concepts Wrong?

A posteriori physicalism is the combination of two appealing views: physicalism (i.e. the view that all facts are either physical or entailed by the physical), and conceptual dualism (i.e. the view that phenomenal truths are not entailed a priori by physical truths). Recently, some philosophers such as Goff (2011), Levine (2007) and Nida‐Rümelin (2007), among others, have suggested that a posteriori physicalism cannot explain how phenomenal concepts can reveal the nature of phenomenal properties. In this paper, I wish to defend a posteriori physicalism from this new and interesting challenge, by arguing that a posteriori physicalists have the resources to explain how phenomenal concepts can reveal at least something of what it would take for the corresponding phenomenal property to be instantiated.     

The narrative worlds of what is and what if

This paper advances the hypothesis that young children use narrative play and stories to construct two types of fiction, the worlds of what is and what if. Heinz Werner's conceptualization of children's spheres of reality, in which actions, symbols, and events are constructed in particular ways, is used as a theoretical framework for understanding children's play and stories. Drawing on examples of children's spontaneous pretend play and story telling, the paper argues that, beginning in their second year, children use pretend play to differentiate the worlds of everyday-lived reality from an alternative pretend sphere; the world of as if. By their third year, children engage in play which hangs on a narrative framework. Such pretend play offers children further options: the fictional world of plausible make believe which simulates everyday life, what is, and the fictional world of more fantastic possibilities, what if. While the child's use of a narrative framework in her pretend play expands her range of psychological worlds, the developmental shift to purely verbal stories, sometimes during the child's third year, significantly adds to her ability to explore such worlds. An examination of the language young children use to accompany their narrative play and to tell stories demonstrates the ways in which children exploit the narrative form to contrast, compare, and traverse the constructed worlds of what is and what if.     

An Extended Lewis/Stalnaker Semantics and the New Problem of Counterpossibles

Abstract

Closest-possible-world analyses of counterfactuals suffer from what has been called the ‘problem of counterpossibles’: some counterfactuals with metaphysically impossible antecedents seem plainly false, but the proposed analyses imply that they are all (vacuously) true. One alleged solution to this problem is the addition of impossible worlds. In this paper, I argue that the closest possible or impossible world analyses that have recently been suggested suffer from the ‘new problem of counterpossibles’: the proposed analyses imply that some plainly true counterpossibles (viz., ‘counterlogicals’) are false. After motivating and presenting the ‘new problem’, I give reasons to think that the most plausible objection to my argument is not compelling.     

Explanation and Two Conceptions of the Physical

Any position that promises genuine progress on the mind-body problem deserves attention. Recently, Daniel Stoljar has identified a physicalist version of Russells notion of neutral monism; he elegantly argues that with this type of physicalism it is possible to disambiguate on the notion of physicalism in such a way that the problem is resolved. The further issue then arises of whether we have reason to believe that this type of physicalism is in fact true. Ultimately, one needs to argue for this position by inference to the best explanation, and I show that this new type of physicalism does not hold promise of more explanatory prowess than its relevant rivals, and that, whether it is better than its rivals or not, it is doubtful whether it would furnish us with genuine explanations of the phenomenal at all.     

How to be an Anti-Skeptic and a NonContextualist

Contextualists often argue from examples where it seems true to say in one context that a person knows something but not true to say that in another context where skeptical hypotheses have been introduced. The skeptical hypotheses can be moderate, simply mentioning what might be the case or raising questions about what a person is certain of, or radical, where scenarios about demon worlds, brains in vats, The Matrix, etc., are introduced. I argue that the introduction of these skeptical hypotheses leads people to fallaciously infer that it is no longer true to say that the relevant person knows. I believe that that is a better explanation of the so-called intuition that the person does not know than the contextualists who claim that raising these skeptical hypotheses changes the standards that determine when it is true to say S knows that P. At the end I raise the possibility that contextualists might defend their view on pragmatic rather than skeptical grounds by arguing that the standards of evidence rise when more is at stake in a practical sense.     

The Metasyntactic Interpretation of Two-Dimensionalism

Robert Stalnaker contrasts two interpretations, semantic and metasemantic, of the two-dimensionalist framework. On the semantic interpretation, the primary intension or diagonal proposition associated with an utterance is a semantic value that the utterance has in virtue of the actual linguistic meaning of the corresponding sentence, and that primary intension is both what a competent speaker grasps and what determines different secondary intensions or horizontal propositions relative to different possible worlds considered as actual. The metasemantic interpretation reverses the order of explanation: an utterance has the primary intension it has because it yields the secondary intensions it yields relative to different possible worlds considered as actual. In these possible worlds, the semantic facts can be different: the metasemantic interpretation is metasemantic in the sense that the secondary intensions are determined relative to possible worlds considered as actual given the meanings the expressions have there. Stalnaker holds a causal picture of the reference of names, according to which names have no meaning over and above their unique referent, and therefore maintains that the semantic interpretation is not an option. He thus endorses the metasemantic interpretation, while insisting that this interpretation does not, contrary to what he originally thought, yield any account of a priori truth and knowledge. My double aim in this paper is to show (i) that the metasemantic interpretation, as sketched by Stalnaker, is not compatible with one natural understanding of the causal picture of reference, on which names are rigid because they have their original bearers essentially, and (ii) that a third kind of interpretation of the framework is available, the metasyntactic interpretation, which grants that names have their bearers essentially and yields some account of a priori knowledge.     

Physicalism and our knowledge of intrinsic properties

This paper examines recent arguments by Rae Langton and David Lewis intended to prove Humility: the thesis that we have no knowledge of the intrinsic properties of substances. I argue that at best, these arguments are internally incoherent. They at once presuppose a strong version of physicalism according to which physical science is in a position to give a complete list of the fundamental properties of reality, and at the same time various metaphysical principles which in actuality challenge the completeness of the list of properties given by science. Although these arguments are unsound, their consideration enables us to draw important conclusions regarding the tension between the metaphysician's practice of positing intrinsic properties that give colour to the world, and the scientific attempt at giving a complete account of all phenomena.     

现代本质主义的逻辑基础与哲学意蕴

<正>现代分析哲学家致力于意义的分析,力图通过对语言的分析使哲学科学化。以罗素和逻辑实证主义为代表的前期分析哲学家拒斥一切形而上学,所有导致本质主义的学说均被他们宣布为虚妄。但到     

Thomas vs. Thomas: A New Approach to Nagel's Bat Argument

In this paper I examine Thomas Nagel's familiar challenge to physicalism. Nagel famously uses his vivid example about the sensory apparatus of bats to illustrate the difficulty of providing a purely physical characterization of phenomenal experience. Adapting Thomas Aquinas's principle regarding the nature of divine omnipotence, I argue that the fact that we cannot know what it is like to be a bat does not threaten physicalism.