Topics Philosophers

Question What is a possible world? So I read Quine's two dogmas, and he says that there is no distinction between an analytic statement and a synthetic one. If I have that right. But when people talk about possible worlds they seem to think there is. So if Quine is right there is only one possible world, isn't there?

Accepted:
June 14, 2012

Comments

I'm not sure there's much of a connection. Whether or not some things are true by virtue of meaning along and whether there are incompatible ways things could be strike me as different questions. The thought might be that if there are no analytic truths, there are no necessary truths, no impossibilities, and no meaningful distinctions between supposed possibilities, hence no notion of different possible worlds. But that seems way too quick.

For starts, whether there are necessary truths and whether such truths hold by virtue of meaning alone are different questions. I can't talk myself out of thinking that "1 +1 = 2" is a necessary truth, even if I'm a lot less sure that it holds by virtue of meaning alone. I also think that "There are no more than 2 people in this room" (i.e., the one I'm in right now) and "there are at least 7 people in this room" are two different, incompatible possibilities, whether or not the analytic/synthetic distinction is real.

But leave all that heady stuff aside. You asked what possible worlds are. I'd suggest that there's no one answer, and that for many purposes it doesn't matter. Some people think of possible worlds as complete ways everything could be; some of those people think of these worlds as concrete, others as abstract. But in many contexts, none of this matters. We use the notion of possible worlds to do certain logical jobs - to represent distinct possibilities for purposes of carrying out certain kinds of reasoning. Though it's not a perfect analogy, the case of numbers is instructive: philosophers disagree deeply about what numbers are or whether there "really" are numbers. But we're all happy to use number talk, and so we should be. Even if possible worlds are nothing more than fictions, they're remarkably useful ones. The same may be true of possible words.