Argumenta – Journal of Analytic Philosophy

 

Dispositional Arrays: Why So Scared of Possible Worlds? [Special Issue]

Issue: Issue 14 • Author/s: Lorenzo Azzano
Topics: Epistemology, Metaphysics, Modal Logic, Ontology, Philosophical logic, Philosophy of language

Some philosophers believe that powers are more acceptable, naturalistic, non-ad hoc and actualist-friendly candidates to replace possible worlds (PWs) in a dispositionalist analysis of modality. However, such a swift opposition between powers and PWs is both unwarranted and problematic. Furthermore, there is at least one power-based ontology of PWs, which in turn offers a power-based applied PW-semantics for dispositionalists. On this account, first briefly suggested in Vetter 2015, a PW is taken to be a dispositional array, viz., a power for the entire universe to be so-and-so. I discuss several…