
Rational Reasons, Counterfactual Statements and “Impossible Worlds” in the Philosophical Justifications of Thought Experiments
Author(s) -
V. N. Karpovich
Publication year - 2022
Publication title -
sibirskij filosofskij žurnal
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 2541-7517
DOI - 10.25205/2541-7517-2021-19-3-33-43
Subject(s) - possible world , impossibility , epistemology , negation , contradiction , metaphysics , counterfactual thinking , philosophy , law of excluded middle , completeness (order theory) , extension (predicate logic) , counterfactual conditional , mathematics , computer science , linguistics , law , mathematical analysis , political science , programming language
In his theory of natural laws David Lewis rejects the authenticity of impossible worlds on the grounds that the contradiction contained within his modifier "in (the world) w" is tantamount to a contradiction in the whole theory, which seems unacceptable. At the same time, in philosophical discourse very often researchers use counterfactual situations and thought experiments with impossible events and objects. There is a need to apply the theory of worlds to genuine, concrete, but impossible worlds. One way to do this is to reject Lewis's classical negation on the grounds that it leads to problems of completeness and inconsistency inside the worlds. The proposed extension for impossibility is compatible with Lewis's extensional metaphysics, although it leads to some loss for description completeness in semantics.