MODAL SPACE EXPLORATION: REPLIES TO BALLARIN, HAYAKI, AND KIM

Roberta Ballarin does an admirably concise and accurate job of summarizing my complex views on worlds as modal indices and related issues. I would like to make one correction and offer a few clarifications. Ballarin thinks that I take the notion of impossibility (or possibility) as primitive. I do not. For any kind K of possibility, to say that P is K-possibly true is to say that P is true at some world at which the K-proprietary constraint on worlds holds (e.g., the appropriate laws are true); and impossibility is defined as the denial of possibility. In these definitions, the heavy lifting is done by the notions of world, truth, and proprietary constraint. Ballarin is right in saying that I am motivated by taking temporal cases as central and developing a theory of worlds by analogy. As she puts it, very few people feel uneasy about times as entities. Like spatial regions, times are relativizers of things-being-thus-and-so. We have an intuitive and immediate understanding of times and spatial regions as such relativizers. I propose the same for worlds. They are a third kind of relativizers of things-being-thus-andso, and we intuitively and immediately grasp the difference between this kind and the other two kinds. It is the intuitiveness and immediacy that give an appearance of mysteriousness Ballarin attributes to times. I doubt that we can go beyond the intuitive and immediate understanding of times, or of worlds. Ballarin coins a wonderfully vivid term “double soul” to characterize my position. She is right in viewing my project as that of combining two apparently opposite views. She thinks that this results in a position that is doubly plagued with the disadvantages of the two views, whereas I naturally think that my position is doubly blessed with their advantages. The primitiveness of actuality, presentness, and hereness is unavoidable, and the popular “indexical” theories of these notions, which I heartily accept, do not eliminate it. A context of utterance in the technical sense of the “indexical” theories is not always a context in which an utterance occurs. Take the context of utterance, . The sentence type, “I am not actually uttering any of these words here now,” expresses a certain proposition, P, as evaluated for propositional expression with respect to this ordered quadruple (and an appropriately reflexive interpretation of the phrase “these words”), and P is true iff Roberta Ballarin was not uttering any of the words “I am not actually uttering any of these words here now” at @ in Stockholm at 12:00 noon on the twenty-third of June 2011. Analytic Philosophy Vol. 52 No. 4 December 2011 pp. 302–311