Abstract
In this paper, I examine our intuitive understanding of metaphysical contingency, and ask what features a metaphysical picture must possess in order to satisfy our intuitions about modal matters. After spelling out what I think are the central intuitions in this domain, I examine the debate between the two most widely held views on the nature of modality, namely, modal realism and modal actualism. I argue that while each of these views is able to accommodate some of our intuitions, it leaves others unsatisfied. I then present an alternative metaphysical picture, which I argue can accommodate our intuitions in a way that the traditional views cannot. More specifically, I argue that our intuitions about modality call for a pluralist view of the structure of reality—a view on which there is more than one ultimate ‘shape’ to the fundamental facts, each corresponding to a distinct metaphysically privileged perspective on reality.
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Notes
For the purposes of this paper, I will be operating under a very general notion of what it means for something to be fundamental or part of the ultimate structure of reality. I will not presuppose any particular view about how these notions should be cashed out; I intend my arguments to be entirely neutral in this respect.
I don’t mean to suggest that we are intuitively ontologically committed to ‘ways the world might have been.’ This is simply another way to put the intuition that things genuinely could have been otherwise.
There are, of course, contexts where the term ‘actually’ plays an important semantic role. All I mean here is that the term seems redundant in non-embedded contexts, i.e., simply that ‘actually p’ is semantically equivalent to ‘p’.
These may not always be contexts of utterance. The relativity of an unsaturated statement might also be relativity to a judge (e.g., for statements about matters of taste), or to some other implicit context.
See Sider (2012, pp. 254–255).
Williamson (2002, p. 239).
The claim that I could have been standing is then analyzed to mean that I have counterparts that are standing in other possible worlds.
Of course, some absolute claims are about matters that are not spatially located at all. But if a claim is about spatially located objects or events, the relevant location must be specified in some way or another.
Bricker allows for more than one possible world to be absolutely actual, but this feature of his view is not relevant for our purposes.
One might wonder how an absolute notion of actuality helps in accommodating the intuition that the facts of the actual world are absolute, or that the term ‘actually’ is metaphysically redundant in the sense described above. After all, if actuality is an absolute property that our world alone possesses, it seems that calling something ‘actual’ is not redundant at all. But Bricker explains that the idea of absolute actuality comes down to the actual world’s being a privileged perspective on reality (see Bricker 2006, pp. 69–70). Privileging the actual world in this way, i.e., as being a privileged perspective on how things are, allows for a view on which actual-worldly claims are seen as metaphysically saturated without having to be indexed to actuality, while other possible-worldly claims still have to be indexed to their respective possible worlds. In this way, the idea of absolute actuality can be seen as granting the actual world the privileged status we want it to have—namely, that of its facts being the absolute facts of reality. This idea of a privileged perspective on reality will be discussed in more detail later on, in Sect. 7.
In fact, Bricker acknowledges that, “the claim, every world is contingently actual, can also be taken to be ambiguous…when interpreted in terms of truth of rather than truth at, it comes out false, not true” (Bricker 2006, p. 55). Bricker explains that he does not find this to be problematic, because, “The problem of contingency, as I see it, is essentially a semantical problem. To solve it, the Leibnizian needs to provide plausible semantical analyses of the modal statements in question within her framework of possible worlds. Success is measured by getting the truth conditions right. The existence of other plausible analyses that get the truth conditions wrong is beside the point.” (Bricker 2006, p. 56.) But the problem I am raising here is not a semantic problem, but a metaphysical one. In order for there to be genuine contingency in how things are, it is not enough for there to be some semantic analysis on which the claim “our world is contingently actual” comes out true. In Bricker’s framework, our world possesses an absolute property of actuality distinguishing it from all other worlds. It’s clear that this absolute property must be possessed by our world contingently if there is to be genuine contingency in how things are—otherwise the way things are at our world will be necessarily the way things are in absolute actuality. And since the absolute property of actuality is possessed by virtue of it being true not at, but of our world that it is absolutely actual, it is this truth of our world that must be contingent—i.e., it is crucial that it be true of our world that it is contingently actual.
In response to this problem, one might be tempted to posit another level of meta-possible-worlds, i.e., possible alternative universes to the entire multi-world reality, so that the contingency of our world’s absolute actuality could be explained by the existence of another multi-world universe in which a different possible world was absolutely actual. But such a move would only push the problem up a level: for our world to really be privileged, we’d want our multi-world universe to be absolutely privileged above the others—otherwise, all possible worlds would be ultimately on par, each having a multi-world universe in which it was privileged as actual. The same problem would then arise in attempting to contingently privilege our multi-world universe above the others.
It might seem as though the modal realist cannot really accommodate M2 or M1, since the two are not fully independent of one another—in order for possible worlds to be genuine alternatives to actuality, the actual world must be distinguished from these alternatives in the right way. But the general point I wish to emphasize is that modal realism fails not for lack of possibilities per se, but for lack of the right kind of distinction between actuality and possibility—which is a failure to accommodate the M2 side of our intuitive conception of contingency.
The ontological actualist needn’t accept this thesis: one could hold that some or even all facts are not actual-worldly in this sense while maintaining that only actual-worldly objects exist. I will return to discuss such a view later on, but I primarily focus on the actualist who accepts actualism about fact-hood because I think this is the most natural and promising way of avoiding the problems raised above for the modal realist. In particular, by adopting actualism about fact-hood the actualist rejects the amodal ‘perspective on reality’ that was at the root of the modal realist’s difficulties.
It is important to note that one needn’t be ontologically committed to facts as genuinely existing entities in order to accept this thesis—all that the actual-worldliness of a fact requires is that whatever it is for the fact to hold and whatever it is for the fact to hold in the actual world are one and the same.
Lewis (1986, pp. 99–100) distinguishes between the analytic actualist, who maintains that it is analytic that actuality is all there is, and thus rejects any ontological commitment to merely possible entities as incoherent, and the metaphysical actualist, who accepts modal realism as conceptually coherent, and simply rejects it as a substantive metaphysical thesis about what there is. The same distinction can be drawn with respect to actualism about fact-hood, or about the more general identification of actuality with all of reality. I focus here on the actualist for whom the general identification of actuality with reality is analytic, because this is the position that takes a genuinely modal perspective on reality and thus seems to have the best chance of avoiding the problems raised above for the modal realist. However, I will return to this issue, and to a version of metaphysical actualism, in Sect. 7.
Prior (1968, p. 195).
One can (and might have reason to) adopt Prior’s Egocentric language as fundamental without being a solipsist, but the language fits particularly well with the solipsist’s position.
I focus here on a version of presentism that is analogous to the kind of actualism I introduced above, so I assume that the presentist’s identification of the present with the totality of what is real is not merely a matter of ontology, but a more general statement about reality. A presentist could resist the claims I make here, however, and maintain that there are non-present (or ‘atemporally shaped’) facts even though there are no non-present objects. But as I’ll argue when I return to the modal analogue of this position, I think such a view must ultimately be understood as more radically pluralist than it sounds.
Thanks to Meghan Sullivan, whose comments pushed me to clarify the sense in which I think there is a problem here for the presentist.
Fine’s standard realist about tense is one who accepts irreducibly tensed facts and maintains that the present is absolutely privileged above other times (See Fine 2005a).
Fine (2005a, p. 287).
Ibid.
Ibid.
See Fine (2005b), who also argues that some necessary facts must be what he calls ‘unworldly,’ though he maintains that the actual world is the only one that exists. As I’ll argue in the next section, I think this view must be interpreted as more radically pluralist than it appears if it is to avoid the difficulties I raise here.
Thanks to Jack Spencer, whose comments pushed me to clarify this point.
As before, I don’t mean to suggest that we are intuitively ontologically committed to the existence of merely possible worlds—nevertheless, we do naturally represent possibilities as in some sense ‘alongside’ what is actual, with which the actual state of affairs can be compared.
These facts can be thought of as containing primitive modal operators—i.e., modal operators that are fundamental from the modal perspective on reality.
Perhaps there may be a non-fundamental perspective from which we can attempt to understand how the two fundamental perspectives relate, but I think the non-fundamental descriptions of reality we come up with in this way are bound to be misleading, at least to some extent.
This position is only available for the metaphysical actualist, who (unlike the analytic actualist) accepts the notion of an amodal perspective on reality as coherent.
Of course, one could talk about how things are modally-or-amodally, but this would be an unnatural way of describing reality, and thus might be misleading in certain respects. Even describing the situation as one in which there are two distinct sets of facts—modal and amodal—is somewhat misleading. One can also describe the very same facts that are absolute in the modal sense as metaphysically unsaturated in the amodal sense, and thus see the modal facts as constituents of amodal facts. As explained earlier, I think any such attempt to describe how things ‘ultimately’ are from a neutral perspective will be misleading, as there can be no neutral perspective for a view on which neither the modal nor the amodal perspective is privileged.
See Bricker (2006).
References
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Acknowledgments
I am grateful to Ted Sider for much helpful feedback and discussion throughout the development of this paper, as well as to Kit Fine, Meghan Sullivan, Jack Spencer, David Chalmers, Erica Shumener, Kris McDaniel, Jared Warren, participants of the 2012 Bellingham Summer Philosophy Conference, and participants of the NYU Thesis Preparation Seminar for valuable discussion and comments on earlier drafts.
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Solomyak, O. Actuality and the amodal perspective. Philos Stud 164, 15–40 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-013-0096-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-013-0096-8