Practice question · True or false
On Lewis’s modal realism, other possible worlds are spatiotemporally isolated from ours, which is why we cannot investigate them.
Hints
- Ask whether one could in principle travel to another world on this view.
- Lewis held that worlds are causally and spatiotemporally cut off from each other.
Show the answer
True
Why
True. Lewis held worlds are concrete but wholly isolated: no travel, no causal contact, no spatial relation. "Actual" is indexical, meaning simply "this one", exactly as "here" means wherever the speaker happens to be.
Practise Modal Systems and Possible Worlds
The app has 3 more questions on this lesson, and keeps your place in the course. Philosophy I is free to start.
More questions on Modal Systems and Possible Worlds
- Which are components of a modal MODEL, as opposed to a bare frame?
- Which are genuine objections to using possible worlds to explain modality?
- On modal realism, 'actual' is an indexical term rather than an absolute property. What follows from this…
- Sort each position by its account of what possible worlds are.
- Arrange these developments in the order they occurred in the history of modal logic.
- In S5, any string of modal operators reduces to its final operator. Set the number of operators remaining…
- Match each branch of modal logic to what its operators range over.