THE PERILS OF PRIMITIVISM: TAKASHI YAGISAWA'S WORLDS AND INDIVIDUALS, POSSIBLE AND OTHERWISE

Takashi Yagisawa’s recent book Worlds and Individuals, Possible and Otherwise (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010) is an ambitious and systematic work that aims to offer a comprehensive and original understanding of modality. The book does indeed succeed on both fronts. Yagisawa’s stand on modality is, to the best of my knowledge, original, and the book contributes to many contemporary modality-related debates in metaphysics, like fiction, belief and belief reports, vagueness, counterfactuals, and, of course, time and modality. In this short piece, I cannot render full justice to the complexity and the many interesting ramifications of Yagisawa’s views. In what follows, I focus instead on what I take to be the overall structure of Yagisawa’s understanding of modality and time, aiming to identify the driving force behind it. Naturally, I will point out those aspects of the view that I find problematic. In particular, my comments will revolve around the following three topics: (i) possible worlds as modal indices; (ii) transworld identity; and (iii) Yagisawa’s claim that existence, unlike reality, is relative.