modality and tense philosophical papers sep 2005

[...]... thinking about modality has been sustained by a deep animosity to these two views It has seemed to me almost axiomatic that there is an intelligible distinction between what is necessary and what is contingent and that there is an ontological difference between actual objects and merely possible objects—between actual people and actual cities on the one hand, and merely possible people and merely possible... tense- logical case and there is nothing at all outrageous in the view that the tensed facts that obtain at the present time are no more real than the tensed facts that obtain at any other time Tense and Reality’ (Ch 8) is largely an exploration of the implications of adopting a non-standard form of realism about tense I spend a good deal of 16 Introduction time trying to state what the position is and, on this... metaphysical modality has had a beneficial effect on the discussion of a number of philosophical topics But there is a danger of its becoming a new restrictive orthodoxy, with metaphysical modality supplanting logical modality as the arbiter of intelligibility for all things modal The question of how we should understand metaphysical modality is further pursued in the most recent of the papers from this... unpublished paper, ‘Reference, Essence, and Identity’, which opens the present collection Quine, of course, had arguments against modality both in its application to sentences (modality de dicto) and in its application to objects (modality de re) The focus of Chs 2 and 3 is on the second class of arguments We follow Quine in assuming, if only for the sake of argument, that modality has intelligible application... case of tense By taking the concept of reality more seriously as an integral element of McTaggart’s argument, it is possible, I believe, to achieve a deeper understanding of what the argument is and how it might be met Although I do not take a stand on whether to be realist about tense, I do argue that the non-standard forms of realism are more plausible, in several key respects, than the standard forms... facts that are incapable of jointly obtaining at a single standpoint By challenging either of these assumptions, one can thereby embrace a position that accepts the worldly or tensed facts but does not accept a privileged standpoint from which they obtain The resulting form of realism about the worldly or the tensed facts I dub ‘non-standard’; and it can take either of two forms depending upon which assumption... different ontological status from the actual world and what goes on in it.1 But combine the regularity view of modality with a nominalism about what there is and we end up with a position very like Lewis’s Indeed, it might be argued that, au fond, Lewis is as sceptical of modal notions as Quine Neither can understand modality except as a form of regularity; and the only difference between them lies in the... against the arguments of Quine Several philosophers (they include Barcan Marcus [1990], Kaplan [1986], Kripke [1980], and Plantinga [1974]) have taken on this task; and my own attempt is made in two companion papers, ‘The Problem of De Re Modality and ‘Quine on Quantifying In’ (Chs 2 and 3 of the present volume) The second of these was intended to provide an abridged version of the first but ended up... how one might combine a worldly or tensed conception of the facts with an unworldly or tenseless conception of the standpoint from which they obtain The first is that reality is absolute; the facts that constitute reality are those that simply obtain, they do not obtain relative to this or that standpoint The second is that reality is coherent; it is ‘of a piece’ and will not contain facts that are... we may call ‘modal myopia’, is a matter of seeing all modality as metaphysical; every modality is somehow to be understood as a form of metaphysical modality The failure to distinguish between the identity or essence of an object and its necessary features is an instance of modal mania Another, that I have discussed elsewhere,5 is provided by the standard modal characterization of supervenience: one .