The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics by A. W. Moore

Author:A. W. Moore
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2012-03-26T16:00:00+00:00

3. Modal Realism

Aptly, the notorious view to which I referred towards the end of the previous section is a view about what there is. Lewis dubs it modal realism (Plurality, p. 2). It is the view – a throwback to Leibniz – that, as well as the actual world and all that constitutes it, there are countless other possible worlds and all that constitutes them.18

Lewis’ conception of possible worlds and his philosophical interest in them are quite different from Leibniz’. For both of them, however, there is a basic link between possible worlds and modal notions such as necessity, possibility, and contingency. What is necessarily the case is what is the case in all possible worlds; what is possibly the case is what is the case in at least one possible world; and what is contingently the case is what is the case in this world, the actual world, but not in all of them.

For Lewis, each of these possible worlds is a spatio-temporally unified cosmos causally independent of each of the others. And the things that constitute it really do exist. Thus given that there could have been flying pigs, in other words given that there is at least one possible world in which there are flying pigs, then there really are flying pigs. True, there are no flying pigs in the actual world, a fact that we might naturally express by saying, ‘There are no flying pigs.’ But that is no embarrassment for Lewis. He points out that our talk of what there is or is not is often tacitly and quite legitimately restricted, in a way that the context makes clear. Someone who says, ‘There are no flying pigs,’ is naturally interpreted as making a claim about what there is in the actual world – just as someone who opens the fridge and says, ‘There are no eggs,’ is naturally interpreted as making a claim about what there is in the fridge. The former claim is no more vitiated by all the flying pigs in other possible worlds than the latter claim is by all the eggs in other people’s fridges. (See Plurality, esp. §§1.1, 1.2, and 2.1; cf. also ‘Counterpart Theory’.)19

Whatever we make of such modal realism, there are two respects in which it appears radically un-Quinean. First, it appears not even to make sense unless there is a distinction to be drawn between what is necessarily the case and what is contingently the case; but this is one of the distinctions that we saw Quine repudiate in §4 of the previous chapter. Second, such modal realism appears to be ontologically extravagant; but, as we saw in §7 of the previous chapter, Quine is keen to acknowledge the existence of as little as possible.

In fact, the offence against Quine is not as great in either case as it appears. As far as the first point is concerned, the mere claim that all these possible worlds and their constituents exist is not, by itself, under any direct threat from Quine’s attack on the necessary/contingent distinction.

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