Genuine Modal Realism, the Humean thesis and advanced modalizing
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Genuine Modal Realism, the Humean thesis and advanced modalizing Sonia Roca-Royes1
Received: 23 August 2014 / Accepted: 8 February 2018 © The Author(s) 2018
Abstract The paper argues that Lewis’ Genuine Modal Realism, in taking the plurality of worlds to be necessarily the way it is, implies the existence of necessary connections of the sort that contradicts the Humean thesis that Lewis endorses. By endorsing, pace Divers, a non-redundancy interpretation of advanced modalizing, we gain the means to exactly state what these connections amount to. Keywords Advanced modalizing · Genuine Modal Realism · Humean thesis · Lewis · Possible worlds We can always ask the modal question “Is it possible that reality is different from that postulated by the realist”. […] the reasonable answer is ‘yes’. (Skyrms 1976, p. 332)
1 Introduction Modalizing can be, in Divers’s terms, basic or advanced. Basic modalizing is modalizing about ordinary individuals; where, in the context of (Divers 1999), the notion of an ordinary individual is characterized as that of individuals that not only are spatiotemporally located but also have all their (spatiotemporal) parts spatiotemporally related to one another. By contrast, advanced modal claims are modal claims about entities other than spatiotemporally unified individuals (perhaps, then, spatiotemporally disunified individuals, sets, numbers, properties, propositions and events). (Divers 1999, p. 217)
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Sonia Roca-Royes [email protected] University of Stirling, Room A74, Pathfoot, Stirling FK9 4LA, Scotland, UK
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Synthese
Skyrms’s question above—like his answer—is an advanced modal one. The use of advanced modalizing is very common too when raising objections of moral indifference against Lewis’s Genuine Modal Realism; ‘GMR’ henceforth. These are objections unified in the first instance by the fact that they explore the consequences of Lewis’s claim that, contrary to Skyrms’s reasonable expected answer, “the character of the totality of worlds is not a contingent matter” (Lewis 1986, p. 126); a claim which is itself an instance of advanced modalizing. 1 They are then unified also by the fact that they find the consequences of this Lewisian claim untenable, leading to moral indifference. Thus, Adams asks, on the basis of the necessary character of the totality of worlds, “What is wrong with actualizing evils, since they will occur in some other possible world anyway if they don’t occur in this one?” (Adams 1974, p. 216) and complains that GMR cannot provide an ethically satisfying answer. Reviving the spirit of Adams’ indifference objection, Heller argues that there’s no reason to save a drowning child when the saving of her is inevitably linked—due again to the necessary character of the totality of worlds—to the dying of another drowning child: “What is morally relevant to the indifference is the known inevitability of one survival and one death no matter which choice is made” (Heller 2003, p. 9). In a similar vein, Beedle’s indifference concerns stem also from the fact
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