On The Thorny Question of Impossible Antecedent
Impossible antecedents pose a challenge to any theory of conditionals, for they give rise to apparently conflicting intuitions that prove hard to reconcile. This paper focuses on a distinctive family of theories which hinge on the idea that a conditional holds when its antecedent is incompatible with the negation of its consequent. As will be shown, there are different ways to deal with impossible antecedents in a formal framework where conditionals are defined in terms of incompatibility. I will outline three such ways and discuss some of their implications.
The Metaphysics of Possibility Semantics
Works by (Humberstone 1981, 2011), van Benthem (1981, 2016), Holliday 2014, 2025, and Ding & Holliday 2020 attempt to develop a semantics of modal logic in terms of "possibilities", i.e., "less determinate entities than possible worlds" (Edgington 1985). These works take possibilities as semantically primitive entities, stipulate a number of semantic principles that govern these entities (namely, Ordering, Persistence, Refinement, Cofinality, Negation, and Conjunction), and then interpret a modal language via this semantic structure. In this paper, we define possibilities in object theory (OT), and derive as theorems, the semantic principles stipulated in the works cited. We then raise a concern for the semantic investigation of possibilities without a primitive modal operator, and show that no such concerns apply to the metaphysics of possibilities as developed in OT.
Tomas Albergo (University of Pittsburgh)
"Negation and the “Unthinkability” of Logical Contradictions"
Jonas Amar (Free University of Berlin)
“Dispositions, Bundles and Essences”
Giacomo Andreoletti (University of Salzburg)
“Bayesianism, Time Travel and Abilities”
Tibor Bárány (Budapest University of Technology and Economics)
“Possibility-Fictionality Asymmetry, Non-triviality, and Interpretative Asymmetry”
Riccardo Baratella (University of Genoa)
“The Moral Status of Personites”
Tomasz Bigaj (University of Warsaw)
“The Concept of Qualitative/Non-Qualitative Properties: A Modal Analysis”
Christabel Cane (University College London)
“The Possible Octogenarian: Making Sense of Modal Claims About Temporal Extent”
Jack Casey (University of Cambridge)
“Humean Laws Do Not Supervene On Their Instances”
Felipe Morales Carbonell (Universidad de Chile)
“Knowing How To Do Something Similarly”
Tadeusz Ciecierski (University of Warsaw)
“Singular Propositions and Abstract Individuals”
Tyler Collins (Freie Universität Berlin)
“Continuous Manifestation and Explanatory Connection”
Michael De (Utrecht University)
“Logic without impossibilities”
Lucas Escobar (École Normale Supérieure)
“Knowing the Past and Backtracking Counterfactuals”
Elżbieta Eysymont (University of Warsaw)
“Modal Normativism: How Semantic Rules Unlock Modal Knowledge”
Alessandro Giordani (Catholic University of Milan) & Vita Saitta (Catholic University of Milan)
“Necessity and Possibility in Truthmaker Semantics”
M.J. García Encinas (University of Granada)
“Transcendental Argumentsfor the Indispensability of Metaphysical Categories”
Sebastian Horvat (University of Vienna)
“From Physical Possibility to Physical Compossibility”
Jeremiah Joven Joaquin (De La Salle University)
“Five Problems for Five-Dimensionalists”
Cameron Johnson (CUNY Graduate Center)
“Taming Possibility: On the Cardinality of Lewisian Possible Worlds”
Andrej Jovićević (KU Leuven)
“There is no Sufficiently Weak Being Constraint”
Ethan Lai (University of St. Andrews)
“Personal Probabilism: How Do We Rule Out Personally Possible Worlds?”
Yucheng Li (University of Virginia)
“Explaining Actuality”
Karol Lenart (University of Warsaw)
“Grounding Qualitativism, Ramsification and Multiple Realizability”
Giorgio Lenta (with Johannes Korbmacher) (Università degli Studi di Genova)
“A Combined Approach to Hyperintensional Counterfactuals (and Counterpossibles)”
Milenko Lasnibat (University of Bristol)
“Lockean Essences Are Neither Aristotelian Nor Metaphysically Necessary”
Hayden Macklin (University of California, Davis)
"Essentialism and Potentialism: Allies or Competitors?"
Adam Murray (University of Manitoba)
“Immanent Universals and Symmetric Dependence”
Peter Marton (UMass Boston)
“Are There Invalid Argument Forms?”
Robert Oliver Mesa
"An Agency-Based Epistemology of Objective Impossibility"
Christopher Masterman (University of St. Andrews)
“Can We Repudiate Ontology Altogether?”
Cristina Nencha (University of Bergamo)
“What We Could Learn from the Gap Between Essence and Modality”
Karol Polcyn (University of Szczecin)
“The Intuition of Dualism and an Epistemic Gap”
Jonas Raab (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universit at Munich)
“Easy Arguments, their Appeal, and their Fallaciousness”
Enda Russell (Trinity College Dublin)
“A New Defence of Humeanism about Laws”
Maciej Sendłak (University of Warsaw)
“Metaontology of Dependence”
Krzysztof Sękowski (University of Warsaw)
“Modal Normativism Essentialized”
Matthew James Norris-Silva (The Bios Centre)
"Grounded in God: Rethinking Theological Fatalism Through Possible Worlds"
Jarred Snodgrass (University of St. Andrews)
“Co-Intensional Properties and Running Afoul of Occam's Razor”
Nikola Stamenković (University of Belgrade)
“Counterpossibles and Hirsch’s Ontological Deflationism”
Kordula Świętorzecka and Konrad Zdanowski (Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński University)
“A Strong Completeness Theorem for Theories of Finitely Branching Time”
Chris Tillman (University of Manitoba)
“No empty names, no problems?”
Bartłomiej Uzar (Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński University in Warsaw)
“Note on Two Semantics for Some Fragment of E. Zalta’s Elementary Theory of Abstract Objects”
Federico Viglione (Università degli Studi di Milano)
“How to Traverse the Infinite Starting Now”
Michael Wallner (University of Graz)
“Metaphysical Foundationalism vs. Infinitism: What’s at Stake?”
Nathan Wildman (Tilburg University)
“Coulda Been a Contender? A Puzzle about In-fiction Modality”