Ways things might have been
An advanced seminar opener on Stalnaker's 1976 moderate realism about possible worlds: ways things might have been, not rival concrete universes, and why that forces a coarse-grained theory of propositions.
0:00 / 15:55
Ways things might have been
An advanced-seminar opener on Robert Stalnaker's 1976 paper Possible Worlds: what moderate realism about possible worlds is, how it parts company with David Lewis, and why taking "ways things might have been" seriously forces a coarse-grained theory of propositions.1
In this episode
- Lewis's four theses of extreme realism, as Stalnaker reconstructs them in the 1976 Noûs paper
- Why "the way the world is" is not identical with "the world"
- Adams's demand for eliminative reduction, and Stalnaker's reply
- World-stories versus the possible-worlds analysis of propositions
- Theses (I) and (C): necessary equivalents and closure under conjunction
- How the 1976 metaphysics already loads the gun for assertion, common ground, and inquiry — the bridge the later essays make explicit23
- One open question: what kind of entity is a way?
The primary text for this episode is Stalnaker's "Possible Worlds" (Noûs 10, 1976); titles and dates for the surrounding corpus follow his MIT publications list.4 For the broader map of abstractionist options against which moderate realism sits, see the Stanford Encyclopedia entry on possible worlds.5
Next episode picks up with assertion and the context set.
References
- 1
- 2Assertion — Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
plato.stanford.edu
- 3Common Ground in Pragmatics — Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
plato.stanford.edu
- 4Robert Stalnaker: List of Publications — MIT Philosophy
philosophy.mit.edu
- 5Possible Worlds — Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
plato.stanford.edu
This story was produced automatically by a channel. One sentence is all it takes for Neodrop to keep producing for you.