Two concepts of possible worlds – or only one?
Theoria 74 (4):318-330 (2008)
| Abstract | In his "Two Concepts of Possible Worlds" (1986), Peter Van Inwagen explores two kinds of views about the nature of possible worlds: abstractionism and concretism. The latter is the view defended by David Lewis, who claims that possible worlds are concrete spatio-temporal universes, very much like our own, causally and spatio-temporally disconnected from each other. The former is the view of the majority, who claim that possible worlds are some kind of abstract objects – such as propositions, properties, states of affairs or sets of numbers. In this paper, I will develop this view in an "extreme abstractionist" way, appealing to a "modal bundle theory", and I will try to show that it is preferable to the standard abstractionist views. Finally, I will compare this kind of abstractionism to concretism, only to find that the difference between the two is minimal. | |||||||||
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