Combining Texts

Ideas for 'Defending the Axioms', 'Three Grades of Modal Involvement' and 'Significance of the Kripkean Nec A Posteriori'

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4 ideas

10. Modality / A. Necessity / 2. Nature of Necessity
10921 Necessity can attach to statement-names, to statements, and to open sentences [Quine]
     Full Idea: Three degrees necessity in logic or semantics: first and least is attaching a semantical predicate to the names of statements (as Nec '9>5'); second and more drastic attaches to statements themselves; third and gravest attaches to open sentences.
     From: Willard Quine (Three Grades of Modal Involvement [1953], p.158)
10. Modality / A. Necessity / 11. Denial of Necessity
10924 Necessity is in the way in which we say things, and not things themselves [Quine]
     Full Idea: Necessity resides in the way in which we say things, and not in the things we talk about.
     From: Willard Quine (Three Grades of Modal Involvement [1953], p.176)
     A reaction: This is a culminating idea of Quine's thoroughgoing empiricism, as filtered through logical positivism. I would hardly dare to accuse Quine of a use/mention confusion (his own bête noir), but one seems to me to be lurking here.
10. Modality / C. Sources of Modality / 3. Necessity by Convention
13973 A key achievement of Kripke is showing that important modalities are not linguistic in source [Soames]
     Full Idea: None of Kripke's many achievements is more important than his breaking the spell of the linguistic as the source of philosophically important modalities.
     From: Scott Soames (Significance of the Kripkean Nec A Posteriori [2006], p.186)
     A reaction: Put like that, Kripke may have had the single most important thought of modern times. I take good philosophy to be exactly the same as good scientific theorising, in that it all arises out of the nature of reality (and I include logic in that).
10. Modality / E. Possible worlds / 2. Nature of Possible Worlds / a. Nature of possible worlds
13968 Kripkean possible worlds are abstract maximal states in which the real world could have been [Soames]
     Full Idea: For the Kripkean possible states of the world are not alternate concrete universes, but abstract objects. Metaphysically possible world-states are maximally complete ways the real concrete universe could have been.
     From: Scott Soames (Significance of the Kripkean Nec A Posteriori [2006], p.167)
     A reaction: This is probably clearer about the Kripkean view than Kripke ever is, but then that is part of Soames's mission. It sounds like the right way to conceive possible worlds. At least there is some commitment there, rather than instrumentalism about them.