Abstract
Professors Bressan and Suppes have both argued that modality is of great importance to the philosophy of science. I shall not dispute this, but I shall raise some problems of interpretation, which arise if one considers the possibility of a philosophical retrenchment with respect to the use of modal concepts.
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Notes
P. Suppes, Introduction to Logic, Van Nostrand, Princeton, 1957, p. 298.
For references and discussion, see M. Jammer, Concepts of Mass, Harper, New York, 1964, pp. 92–95; Pendse’s papers are in the Philosophical Magazine 24 (1937); 27 (1939); and 29 (1940).
H. Simon, ‘Discussion: The Axioms of Classical Mechanics’, Philosophy of Science 21 (1954) 340–343; ‘Definable Terms and Primitives in Axiom Systems’, in The Axiomatic Method (ed. by L. Henkin et al.>), North-Holland, Amsterdam 1954, pp. 443–453; ‘A Note on Almost-Everywhere Definability’ (abstract), Journal of Symbolic Logic 31 (1966) 705–706.
R. Stalnaker, ‘A Theory of Conditionals’, in Studies in Logical Theory (ed. by N. Rescher), Oxford 1968, pp. 98–112;
R. Stalnaker and R. H. Thomason, ‘A Semantic Analysis of Conditional Logic’, Theoria 36 (1970) 23–42.
For references and discussion, see my Introduction to the Philosophy of Time and Space, Random House, New York, 1970 (henceforth IPTS), Chapter VI, Sections 2 and 3.
A. Grünbaum, ‘Why I Am Afraid of Absolute Space’, Australasian Journal of Philosophy 49 (1971) 96.
For one line of thought, see IPTS, pp. 97–107 and 195–198; for another, my ‘Meaning Relations, Possible Objects, and Possible Worlds’ (with K. Lambert) in Philosophical Problems in Logic (ed. by K. Lambert), Reidel, Dordrecht 1970, pp. 1–19.
See my ‘Theories and Counterfactuals’ forthcoming in a Festschrift in honour of Wilfrid Sellars (ed. by H.-N. Castañeda) and R. H. Thomason, ‘A Fitch-Style Formulation of Conditional Logic’, Logique et Analyse 13 (1970) 397–412; last paragraph.
G. W. Mackey, The Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics, W. A. Benjamin, New York 1963, pp. 1–4. A similar point could be made with reference to H. Simon’s first approach in his ‘The Axioms of Newtonian Mechanics’, Philosophical Magazine 38 (1947) 888–905, and ‘The Axioms of Classical Mechanics’ (see note 3).
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© 1974 D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht-Holland
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Van Fraassen, B.C. (1974). Bressan and Suppes on Modality. In: Schaffner, K.F., Cohen, R.S. (eds) PSA 1972. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol 20. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-2140-1_21
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-2140-1_21
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