Actuality and Possibility

¹ White, Alan R., ‘Conceptual Analysis’, Bontempo, and Odell, (eds) The Owl of Minerva: Philosophers on Philosophy (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1975), 103–104.

² Bambrough, Renford, ‘Principia Metaphysica’, Philosophy 39, No. 148, (1964), 104.

³ For a discussion of some of these issues, with reference to the relevant physics texts, see Earman, John, ‘Causation: A Matter of Life and Death’, Journal of Philosophy 73, No. 1, (1976) 5–25.

⁴ Though I do consider these and other related questions in a further essay on this topic, ‘Actuality and Necessity’, forthcoming.

⁵ Of course, propositions concerning logical possibility will be necessary only if one accepts that the system S5 correctly reflects our pre-formal intuitions concerning modal notions. I discuss this in detail in the paper just mentioned in fn. 4. I do not raise the issue here since those whose arguments I shall be considering do accept that propositions of logical possibility are necessary.

⁶ Lewy, Casimir, Meaning and Modality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 48–49.

⁷ Lewy, , op. cit., 49.

⁸ Mind (1961), 187–200. References hereafter inserted parenthetically into the text. Other versions of this argument can be found in Newell, R. W., The Concept of Philosophy (London: Methuen, 1967), 37 ff., and in Hanson, Norwood Russell, ‘It's Actual, So It's Possible’, Philosophical Studies 10, (1959), 69–80.

⁹ This paper was much improved by the constructive criticism of James Cargile, Donald Gustafson, Ian Hacking, Lawrence Jost, Eric Melvin, and Robert Richardson.

My research was supported by a grant from the Taft Faculty Committee of the University of Cincinnati; their generous assistance is gratefully acknowledged.