Ways a World Might Be. Metaphysical and Anti-Metaphysical Essays

297 Pages·2003·5.25 MB·English

by  Robert C. Stalnaker

Ways a World Might Be
METAPHYSICAL AND ANTI-METAPHYSICAL ESSAYS
C.
RoBERT STALNAKER
Clarendon Press · Oxford
OXFORD
UNIVERSITY PRESS
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6DP
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.
It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship.
and education by publishing worldwide in
Oxford New York
Auckland Bangkok Buenos Aires Cape Town Chennai
Oar es Salaam Delhi Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kolkata
Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai Nairobi
Sao Paulo Shanghai Taipei Tokyo Toronto
Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press
in the UK and in certain other countries
Published in the United States
by Oxford University Press Inc., New York
(QRobert C. Stalnaker 2003
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
Database right Oxford University Press (maker)
First published 2003
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press,
or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate
reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction
outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department.
Oxford University Press, at the address above
You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover
and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Data available
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Data available
ISBN <H9-925t487 (hbk.)
ISBN o-19-9251495 (pbk.)
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Typeset by Kolam Information Services Private Limited, Pondicherry, India.
Printed in Great Britain
on acid-free paper by
Biddies Ltd., Guildford & King's Lynn
In memory of
Louis 0. Mink
Carl G. Hempel
H. Paul Grice
David K. Lewis

Preface
All but two of the papers included in this collection have been previously
published. I thank the editors and publishers for permission to reprint
them. Details of the sources are given on page xii. In most cases, the papers
have been only lightly edited, but Chapter 3-a dialogue on impossible
worlds-has been expanded in response to comments by David Lewis, and
postscripts have been added to Chapters 5 and 8 on some technical issues
discussed in those papers.
Thanks to Andy Egan for invaluable editorial assistance in preparing the
papers and updating the references, and for advice on matters of both
substance and detail. Thanks to Peter Momtchiloff of Oxford University
Press for his good advice about the selection of papers, among many other
things, and for his support.
I can't thank by name all of the many teachers, colleagues, and students
who have helped me to get clearer about the issues discussed in these
papers, so let me thank them collectively, and mention just a few who stand
out.
Saul Kripke must take some of the blame for the preoccupation with
possibilities that is evident in the papers in this collection, since I was first
brought to appreciate the clarifying power of the framework of possible
worlds in his seminar at Princeton in 1964-5 (where ideas about Wittgen
stein on following a rule mingled with the ideas that were later to take form
in Naming and Necessity). The influence of his arguments in Naming and
Necessity on my ideas about the relations between modal, semantic, and
epistemological concepts will be evident throughout these papers, most
explicitly in Part IV.
Four of the papers were originally written for festschrifts, and I am in
debted to the philosophers celebrated in those collections - Paul Benacerraf,
Ed Gettier, Ruth Marcus, and Sydney Shoemaker - all people with remark
able philosophical minds who have influenced my thinking on metaphysical
matters through their work, their example, and philosophical discussion
over the years.
The paper on supervenience (Chapter 5) grew out of a metaphysics sem
inar at MIT taught jointly with Judy Thomson, and my thoughts about this
issue and others in metaphysics have benefitted from her incisive arguments
and analyses. Ned Block's insights into questions about consciousness and
concepts have helped me to see many things I hadn't seen before. Collabor
ation with Ned, first on a seminar on consciousness, and then on a joint
article (Block and Stalnaker 1999), was important to my understanding
of issues both about metaphysical and conceptual possibility, and about
viii Preface
phenomenal consciousness. Some of the ideas in Chapters to, 11, 12, and 13
have their source in that collaboration.
Anyone who spends his or her time thinking and writing about philo
sophical problems develops, along the way, a duster of prejudices and pre
occupations, methods and styles of argument that constitutes, one hopes, a
general view of things. Where it comes from and how it develops is hard to
say, but the examples provided by teachers and colleagues that we both
follow and react against obviously play a crucial role in shaping our philo
sophical personae. The four philosophers to whose memory this book is
dedicated played a particularly important role in my own philosophical
development, both through the substance of their ideas and arguments, and
by the force of their personalities. Let me say a little about each of them.
Louis Mink was my main undergraduate teacher of philosophy at Wes
leyan University. He was at the center of the intellectual life of the univer
sity, and had many students who went on to distinguished careers in
philosophy. Louis had an insatiable intellectual curiosity, and showed us
how to think philosophically about everything. With him I studied Kant
and St Augustine, Collingwood and logical positivism, the philosophy of
history and social science, among other things. He fed my ambivalence
about metaphysics by getting me to appreciate both the richness of the
philosophical tradition and the power of the logical empiricist critique.
Louis has always been, for me, a model of what a philosopher should be.
I first encountered the work of C. G. Hempel in high school, browsing in
Tames R. Newman's anthology, The World of Mathematics. His essays re
printed there, 'On the Nature of Mathematical Truth' and 'Geometry and
Empirical Science' struck me as models of clarity and good sense, as they
still do, and helped to draw me into philosophy. When I got to graduate
school I benefitted from his lively seminars, patient and painstaking com
ments on my work, his writings on explanation, confirmation and concept
formation, and most of all from his example of clarity of mind, intellectual
integrity, and generosity. I was fortunate to be his student and teaching
assistant.
Paul Grice was never my teacher or departmental colleague, but I got to
know him when he made an extended visit to the University of Illinois,
where I was teaching, in 1970, and during a memorable summer institute at
Irvine in 1971. I had earlier been able to attend just one of his William lames
Lectures, but I vividly remember the intellectual excitement of the occasion,
the feeling that we were watching a great philosophical mind in action.
Grice was an opportunistic and experimental thinker, eclectic in his
methods and interests, following out lines of thought to see where they led
him. But a coherent philosophical vision emerged - a view about the rela
tions between language, thought, and action - that has greatly influenced
my own way of thinking about these issues.
Preface
lX
I began corresponding with David Lewis in 1968, when we discovered that
we had developed, independently, similar theories of counterfactuals, and
we had many fruitful and enjoyable discussions over the years from that
time until just before his death in 2001. David was, of course, an unabashed
metaphysician, and one might think that he was untroubled by the kind of
mixed feelings about the subject that I have expressed, but he did say, in the
introduction to his first collection of papers: 'I should have liked to be a
piecemeal, unsystematic philosopher, offering independent proposals on a
variety of topics. It was not to be' (Lewis 1983a: ix). In a sense, it was to be,
for even though David's many philosophical contributions grew out of his
metaphysical system, and fit together with remarkable coherence, he was
careful to show us when an analysis or an argument was detachable by one
who didn't buy into the whole system. His work was widely applied, both
within and outside of philosophy, by researchers who would not have
thought that metaphysics could be relevant to their work. The influence of
David's work, and I hope of his example as well, will be seen in every paper
in this collection.
Those who knew these four philosophers will agree that they were radic
ally different from each other in personal and intellectual style, but they are
all paradigm cases of philosophers, and had much in common. They all had
a passion for philosophy, and a focus on philosophical issues. Style and
method emerged from grappling with them. While each had his own philo
sophical agenda, they were all adept at seeing things from other points of
view, and were generous and effective in showing others how to advance
their own projects. They all had a sense of humor and a sense of fun: they
knew how to take philosophy seriously without taking themselves too ser
iously. They saw, and helped us to see, that philosophy is an activity that is
both enjoyable and worthwhile.
Cambridge, Massachusetts
January 2003

Contents
Details off irst publication xii
Introduction 1
I. Ways and Worlds 23
1. Possible Worlds 25
2. On what Possible Worlds could not be 40
3· Impossibilities 55
11. Carving up Logical Space
4· Anti-essentialism 71
5· Varieties of Supervenience 86
Ill. Identity in and across Possible Worlds 109
6. Counterparts and Identity 111
J. Vague Identity 133
8. The Interaction of Modality with Quantification and
Identity 144
IV. Semantics, Metasemantics, and Metaphysics t63
9. Reference and Necessity 165
10. On considering a Possible World as Actual 188
11. Conceptual Truth and Metaphysical Necessity 201
V. Subjective Possibilities 217
12. Comparing Qualia across Persons 219
13. What is it like to be a Zombie? 239
14. On Thomas Nagel's Objective Self 253
References 277
Index 283
Details of First Publication
A preliminary version of 'Possible Worlds' was published in Nous, to (1976).
The version reprinted here is chapter 3 of my Inquiry (Cambridge, Mass.:
Bradford Books, MIT Press, 1984), 43-58. Reprinted with the permission of
Basil Blackwell Ltd and the MIT Press.
'On what Possible Worlds Could Not Be', in Adam Morton and Stephen
Stich (eds.), Benacerraf and his Critics, (Oxford: Basil Blackwell Ltd., 1996).
Reprinted with the permission of Basil Blackwell Ltd.
'Impossibilities', Philosophical Topics 24 (1996). Reprinted with the permis
sion of the editor.
'Anti-essentialism', Midwest Studies in Philosophy 4 (1979). Reprinted with
the permission of the editor.
'Varieties of Supervenience', Philosophical Perspectives 10: Metaphysics (1996).
Reprinted with the permission of Basil Blackwell Ltd
'Counterparts and Identity', Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 11, Studies in
Essentialism (1987). Reprinted with the permission of the University of Min
nesota Press.
'Vague Identity' in David Austin (ed.), Philosophical Analysis (Dordrecht:
Kluwer, 1988). Reprinted with the kind permission of Kluwer Academic
Publishers.
'The Interaction of Modality with Quantification and Identity', in W. Sinnott
Armstrong, D. Raffman, and N. Asher (eds.), Modality, Morality and Belief:
Essays in honor of Ruth Barcan Marcus (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1994). Reprinted with the permission of Cambridge University Press.
'Reference and Necessity', in Crispin Wright and Bob Hale (eds.), Blackwell
Companion to the Philosophy of Language (Oxford: Basil Blackwell Ltd.,
1997). Reprinted with the permission of Basil Blackwell Ltd.
'On considering a Possible World as Actual; Proceedings of the Aristotelian
Society (2001). Reprinted with the permission of the editor.
'Conceptual Truth and Metaphysical Necessity' is published here for the first
time.
'Comparing Qualia across Persons', Philosophical Topics 26 (2ooo). Re
printed with the permission of the editor.
'What is it Like to be a Zombie?', in John Hawthorne and Tamar Szabo
Gandler (eds.), Conceivability and Possibility (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2002). Reprinted with the permission of Oxford University Press.
'On Thomas Nagel's Objective Self' is published here for the first time.