this is where he goes into counterpart theory and nobody should ever have to go through that. thats when the trans-world heir lines bit comes from and the rigid designation stuff fits in. meaning (loosely) of the referent of a term is derived from its origin. that’s why it’s hier.
There’s only one world. Even if there’s a multiverse, it’s in one world. As in, reality.
Does that have to do with temporal modal logic?
not in modal logic. there are infinite, causally isolated, non-spatiotemporal worlds.
does anything not?
like you cant be in 2 worlds, but you can have a counterpart in one.
So if it isn’t spatiotemporal it’s just an imaginative realm of possibilities.
The thing that gets me is that somehow you get an ontological argument out of that.
no it’s concrete. everything that is in it is causally related to everything else that is in it. just not to anything in any other world.
Is there this idea that the imaginative realm is more real (necessary) than the (contingent) spatiotemporal. realm?
i think in the most rudimentary form, an ontology is a categorization of everything that there is. sometimes that’s within a context and therefore limited. like a scientific ontology wouldn’t include magic spells. so its limited.
but if you’re doing philosophy and you want to make an ontology, there has to be a place for everything. the impossible stuff, the merely possible stuff, the actual stuff, etc. everything. what is actual can move back and fourth based on what you learn about the world that you are in.
i think it has to do with the idea that possible worlds are causally isolated and if they were imagined then something in the actual one could make us imagine them differently and therefore they’d then be affected by that. i know that sounds circular, but all logic is, at it’s bottom, circular.
So stuff that is necessary exists in every possible world. So it has to exist, because one of those possible worlds is the actual world.
have you ever read a book by thomas kuhn called the structure of scientific revolutions? i think it counts as one of those “great books”
bingo. except i wouldn’t say “necessarily exists” id say “is necessary” because everything exists…even the things that aren’t in any possible world. they may exist only in an impossible world where everything is disjointed and does not conform to the basics like identity theory, or reductive and functional descriptions.
some people would argue that logic, reasoning, our ability to analyze and interpret the world around us is bound by the structure of our perception. so it could be that some things exist that do not conform to that. we can’t rule it out. so we have to put that shit somewhere and it can’t be here.
Dr. Carter suggested it … and I think I had a little bit of exposure to it previously, but not much… I don’t think I ever read it. I had some exposure to it when I was studying epistemology book by Christopher Norris (was not ready!). I think that’s the one that talks about paradigm shifts, which I use incorrectly to go quickly (like tectonic earthquake or shift of polarity) rather than slowly. I prefer my use.
I’m going to go out on a limb and say impossible worlds don’t belong in anyone’s ontology.
it is fantastic and worth the time. it wont tell you anything that you dont already know, but it will tell you what you already know in the clearest and most precise terms. if you adopt the idea that the aim should be to gather and categorize information, through your senses, in order to form the best understanding of the world, and then go after modal logic through the language or lewis’ possible worlds and through the lens that you’re in the actual world and want to understand it better, it all falls right into place. lewis just gives you the perfect set of linguistic boxes to organize all the messy stuff in the closet. when you go to sort it all out and clean it up, everything makes sense.
youre not wrong. lewis dismisses that shit right off the bat.
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