Abstract

I might have worn a sweater today. My mug might have been filled with tea and not coffee. In short, things might have been different than they are. ;When I say that things might have been different, it seems that I am committed to believing that, on some level at least, the character of the world is open to change, or admits of a certain flexibility. It seems that I am also committed to the idea that even though things might have been different, they also would have stayed much the same. "I might have worn a sweater today." implies that some property, or quality that I do not have is one that I might have. But note that "I" remain essentially the same. It's not as if by donning a sweater, I am transformed into something else. The problem of modality then is how to account for this sameness in the face of difference. ;This essay is primarily concerned with David Lewis's modal metaphysics. Roughly speaking, he thinks that modal truths are true in virtue of the existence of numerous other worlds, spatio-temporally removed from our own. I contend that Lewis's theory does not have the attributes he claims for it. Specifically, I do not think that the theory he offers respects our intuitions in the way he suggests; nor do I think that the realism he advocates significantly advances our understanding of the problems associated with modality. Finally, I do not think that his argument that other modal theories assume a modal primitive is wholly accurate. ;In the final chapter, I give an ersatz account of possible worlds that recasts the Lewisian notions of accessibility and counterpart relations in terms of contexts and state-descriptions. In some sense, my disagreement with Lewis could not be more acute: I emphatically deny the plausibility of real possible worlds. However, my views are not "too" far from his. I am trying to remove the controversial thesis from Lewis's work while preserving the theory as a whole