(Once again) Lewis on the analysis of modality
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(Once again) Lewis on the analysis of modality John Divers1
· Jade Fletcher1
Received: 4 April 2016 / Accepted: 17 January 2018 © The Author(s) 2018. This article is an open access publication
Abstract We propose a novel interpretation of Lewis on the analysis of modality that is constructed from primary sources, comprehensive and unprecedented (in toto). Our guiding precepts are to distinguish semantics from metaphysics, while respecting the inter-relations between them, and to discern whatever may be special, semantically or metaphysically, about the modal case. Following detailed presentation (Sect. 2), we amplify and advocate our interpretation by providing a conforming genealogy of Lewis’s theory of modality (Sect. 3) and applying it to construct a detailed and newly illuminating version of the Lewisian theory of modality de re (Sect. 4). Keywords Lewis · Metaphysics · semantics · analysis · Semantic Analysis · Modality · Modality De Re · philosophical methodology
1 Introduction1 David Lewis is notable, if not unique, among the great analytic philosophers in prosecuting all three of the following: a positive and robust approach to meaning, involving
1 The Authors would like to thank the following: the volume Editors Marianna Antonutti and Pierluigi Graziani, various anonymous referees who acted for the journal and the participants in a session of the University of Urbino Conference David Lewis: Another World is Possible (at which an early version of the material was presented).
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John Divers [email protected] Jade Fletcher [email protected]
1
University of Leeds, Leeds, UK
123
Synthese
the endorsement of analyticity (e.g. 1975);2 a positive and robust approach to metaphysics, involving the endorsement of metaphysical realism (e.g. 1984, 1986) and the deployment of the concept of truth, univocally, across the theory of meaning (e.g. 1970b) and metaphysical theorizing (e.g. 1992, 2001). For Lewis, then, the philosophical role that characterizes truth is one wherein metaphysical and semantic elements are combined. Truth is that X such that (inter alia) X supervenes on being (metaphysical) and the core element of sentence meaning is given by appropriately specified X-conditions (semantic). Our philosophical concern with all that is true, and how so, is pursued by integrating semantic theorizing and metaphysical theorizing. When the focus of that concern is modal truth, the relevant semantic theory is Counterpart Theory (CT) (1968 et passim) and the relevant metaphysical theory is the total metaphysical theory, Genuine Modal Realism (GMR) (1986 et passim). In CT, truth-conditions for modal sentences are given in terms of quantification over possible worlds and the things that exist in them and the counterpart relations among these. According to GMR, and speaking to the satisfaction of CT truth-conditions, there exists a plurality of possible worlds and the qualitative variety of things existing in them is characterized by a general Humean principle of recombination. In that statement of Lewis’s gen
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