Modal Quantification without Worlds
Billy Dunaway · Oxford University Press eBooks · 2013
Quantificational analyses of modality are often assumed to come with an ontological cost—an ontology of Lewisian concrete worlds or else abstract entities of some kind. This paper sketches how many of the same benefits can be had given independently motivated complications in ideology instead. The ideological resources in question are primitive second-order quantifiers, which bind variables in predicate-position and have no analysis in terms of quantifiers binding variables in the name-position, and a hyperintensional connective like ’in virtue of’. These resources carry no ontological commitments to possible worlds or similar entities, yet are adequate to formulate quantificational analyses of the modal operators ⎕ and ◊, as well as statements of various global supervenience claims. Moreover, given the details of some plausible independent motivations for use of primitive second-order quantification and hyperintensional connectives in metaphysical theorizing, the resulting analysis sheds light on the nature of modality and the notion of truth-at-a-world.