Abstract

A world is trivial if it makes every proposition true all at once. Such a world is impossible, an absurdity. Our world, we hope, is not an absurdity. It is important, nevertheless, for semantic and metaphysical theories that we be able to reason cogently about absurdities—if only to see that they are absurd. In this note we describe methods for ‘observing’ absurd objects like the trivial world without falling in to incoherence, using some basic techniques from modal logic. The goal is to begin to locate the trivial world’s relative position in modal space; the outcome is that the less we assume about relative possibility, the more detail we can discern at the edge of reason.