THE EPISTEMIC ANALYSIS OF LUCK

Episteme ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 319-334 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gregory Stoutenburg
Keyword(s):  
Actual World ◽  
Possible Worlds ◽  
Duncan Pritchard ◽  
Relevant Notion ◽  
Modal Notion ◽  
Neil Levy

AbstractDuncan Pritchard has argued that luck is fundamentally a modal notion: an event is lucky when it occurs in the actual world, but does not occur in more than half of the relevant nearby possible worlds. Jennifer Lackey has provided counterexamples to accounts which, like Pritchard's, only allow for the existence of improbable lucky events. Neil Levy has responded to Lackey by offering a modal account of luck which attempts to respect the intuition that some lucky events occur in more than half of the relevant nearby possible worlds. But his account rejects that events which are as likely as those in Lackey's examples are lucky. Instead, they are merely fortunate. I argue that Levy's argument to this effect fails. I then offer a substitute account of the improbability condition which respects this intuition. This condition says that the relevant notion of probability for luck is epistemic.

The World Essence

Dialogue ◽  
1990 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 205-218 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Bigelow
Keyword(s):  
Natural Kind ◽  
Actual World ◽  
Possible Worlds ◽  
Natural Kinds ◽  
Laws Of Nature ◽  
Joint Paper ◽  
Essential Properties ◽  
The World ◽  
Natural Necessity

Recently, Brian Ellis came up with a neat and novel idea about laws of nature, which at first I misunderstood. Then I participated, with Brian Ellis and Caroline Lierse, in writing a joint paper, “The World as One of a Kind: Natural Necessity and Laws of Nature” (Ellis, Bigelow and Lierse, forthcoming). In this paper, the Ellis idea was formulated in a different way from that in which I had originally interpreted it. Little weight was placed on possible worlds or individual essences. Much weight rested on natural kinds. I thought Ellis to be suggesting that laws of nature attribute essential properties to one grand individual, The World. In fact, Ellis is hostile towards individual essences for any individuals at all, including The World. He is comfortable only with essential properties of kinds, rather than individuals. The Ellis conjecture was that laws of nature attribute essential properties to the natural kind of which the actual world is one (and presumably the only) member.

The Actual World

2015 ◽  
pp. 64-85
Author(s):  
Donald Rutherford
Keyword(s):  
Actual World ◽  
Possible Worlds ◽  
The World

This chapter discusses Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s theory of the actual world as the best of all possible worlds. The chapter opens with Leibniz’s response to the two most basic questions of metaphysics: Why is there something rather than nothing? And, why do certain things exist while other equally possible things do not? It examines Leibniz’s critique of Baruch Spinoza’s metaphysics, with particular reference to the argument that God must make a choice among possible worlds because not all possibles are “compossible.” In addition, it explores Leibniz’s claim that the best of all possible worlds is the world containing the highest level of perfection or reality, intelligibility, order, and harmony. The chapter concludes by looking at three theological doctrines underlying Leibniz’s conception of the best of all possible worlds: divine creation, conservation, and concurrence.

Analysing Modality

2020 ◽  
pp. 22-73
Author(s):  
Alastair Wilson
Keyword(s):  
Actual World ◽  
Possible Worlds ◽  
Modal Realism ◽  
Possible World ◽  
Metaphysical Modality ◽  
Novel Theory ◽  
Reductive Theory

This chapter presents and defends the basic tenets of quantum modal realism. The first of these principles, Individualism, states that Everett worlds are metaphysically possible worlds. The converse of this principle, Generality, states that metaphysically possible worlds are Everett worlds. Combining Individualism and Generality yields Alignment, a conjecture about the nature of possible worlds that is closely analogous to Lewisian modal realism. Like Lewisian modal realism, Alignment entails that each possible world is a real concrete individual of the same basic kind as the actual world. These similarities render EQM suitable for grounding a novel theory of the nature of metaphysical modality with some unique properties. Also like Lewisian modal realism, quantum modal realism is a reductive theory: it accounts for modality in fundamentally non-modal terms. But quantum modal realism also has unique epistemological advantages over Lewisian modal realism and other extant realist approaches to modality.

Epilogue

2016 ◽  
pp. 113-116
Author(s):  
Maria Rosa Antognazza
Keyword(s):  
Actual World ◽  
Possible Worlds ◽  
Theoretical Understanding ◽  
The Core ◽  
Practical Project ◽  
Scientific Advancement ◽  
Way Of Thinking ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Good And Evil

The ‘Epilogue’ concludes that it is possible to trace important elements of Leibniz’s way of thinking back to many different traditions, all of them reshaped and remodelled with the help of conversations with many hundreds of individuals, into a strikingly original outlook. It was in order to explain the actual world as we experience it, and what good and evil we find in it, that Leibniz took us on a journey through possible worlds and the mind of God. This theoretical understanding was for him at the core of an ultimately practical project of scientific advancement for the benefit of humankind.

Plantinga's Necessary A Posteriori Truths

1978 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 323-327
Author(s):  
Gregory W. Fitch
Keyword(s):  
Actual World ◽  
Possible Worlds ◽  
A Priori ◽  
The Other ◽  
Traditional View ◽  
Alvin Plantinga ◽  
A Posteriori ◽  
Necessary A Posteriori ◽  
Necessary Truths

Alvin Plantinga has recently argued that there are certain propositions which are necessary but known only a posteriori. If Plantinga is correct then he has shown that the traditional view that all necessary truths are knowable a priori is false. Plantinga's examples deserve special attention because they differ in important respects from other proposed examples of necessary a posteriori truths. His examples depend on a certain conception of possible worlds and in particular on his conception of the actual world. It will be argued that these examples of necessary a posteriori propositions can be understood in two different ways. According to one way of understanding Plantinga, the propositions turn out to be contingent a posteriori truths, and according to the other way they turn out to be necessary a priori truths. The plausibility of Plantinga's position is due to a confusion between the two possible interpretations.

Anchoring world and time in biblical Hebrew

2004 ◽  
Vol 40 (3) ◽  
pp. 491-526 ◽  
Author(s):  
GALIA HATAV
Keyword(s):  
Noun Phrase ◽  
Actual World ◽  
Possible Worlds ◽  
Biblical Hebrew ◽  
The Other ◽  
Definite Article ◽  
Verbal System ◽  
Reference Time ◽  
Three Components

One of the most puzzling issues in biblical Hebrew has been its verbal system. In this article, I deal with one of the forms, namely wayyiqtol, suggesting that its meaning is compositional, calculated from three components: a verbal base and two morphemes. The verbal base is shown to be modal, involving quantification over possible worlds. The two morphemes prefixed to the verbal base restrict its modal nature. One morpheme functions like the definite article in a noun phrase; it picks out one of the possible worlds, the familiar actual world (Wo), and anchors the event into it. The other morpheme builds a reference-time, locating the event in time.

scholarly journals Induction and Natural Kinds Revisited

2021 ◽  
pp. 284-300
Author(s):  
Howard Sankey
Keyword(s):  
Actual World ◽  
Possible Worlds ◽  
Inductive Inference ◽  
Natural Kinds ◽  
Problem Of Induction ◽  
Shared Set ◽  
Essential Properties ◽  
The World ◽  
Dispositional Essentialism ◽  
Previous Account

Howard Sankey reconsiders a special issue closely connected with causal powers—the problem of induction. He addresses a deep version of problem of circularity originally raised by Psillos, and argues that the circularity can be avoided. The key is recognizing certain epistemically externalist results of the Megaric consequences of the commitment to dispositional essentialism. Circularity can be avoided, Sankey argues, because it is the way the world is, rather than the inductive inference itself, that grounds the reliability of the inductive inference in his previous account. What are doing the work for Sankey here are the Megaric consequences of his adoption of Ellis’s dispositional essentialism. The uniformity in question is one that stretches across possible worlds: nature is uniform in the precise sense that there are natural kinds whose members all possess a shared set of essential properties. The significance of this commitment lies in how the possible and the temporal intersect through restrictions placed on the accessibility relation between the actual and the possible. Ipso facto, when considering questions about the future behaviours of objects, which is how Sankey understands the problem of induction to be, the uniformity of nature can ground the reliability of beliefs about those future behaviours precisely because the domain of possibility is restricted to those worlds accessible to the actual world, which is fixed by the commitments of dispositional essentialism.

scholarly journals Knowing How One Knows

2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 195-205
Author(s):  
Giovanni Rolla ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Actual World ◽  
Possible Worlds ◽  
Practical Knowledge ◽  
Propositional Knowledge ◽  
Knowing How ◽  
Know How ◽  
First Order ◽  
Kk Principle

In this paper, I argue that knowledge is dimly luminous. That is: if a person knows that p, she knows how she knows that p. The argument depends on a safety-based account of propositional knowledge, which is salient in Williamson’s critique of the ‘KK’ principle. I combine that account with non-intellectualism about knowledge-how – according to which, if a person knows how to φ, then in nearly all (if not all) nearby possible worlds in which she φes in the same way as in the actual world, she only φes successfully. Thus, the possession of first-order propositional knowledge implies secondorder practical knowledge, and this can be iterated. Because of the assumed nonintellectualism about know-how, dim luminosity does not imply bright luminosity about knowledge, which is expressed by the traditional KK principle. I conclude by considering some potential counterexamples to the view that knowledge is dimly luminous.

scholarly journals Design Fiction as a Practice for Researching the Social

2020 ◽  
pp. 16-39
Author(s):  
Thomas Markussen ◽  
Eva Knutz ◽  
Tau Lenskjold
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Actual World ◽  
Possible Worlds ◽  
Design Research ◽  
Conceptual Foundation ◽  
Detailed Understanding ◽  
Knowledge Domains ◽  
The Social ◽  
Interdisciplinary Framework ◽  
Design Fiction

The aim of this paper is to contribute to a new conceptual foundation for design fiction. Much attention is dedicated to theorising how design fictions relate to our so-called actual world. This work can be seen as an attempt at securing the seriousness and legitimacy of design fiction as an approach to design research. The theory of possible worlds has proven promising in this regard. We argue, however, that a detailed understanding of design fiction is still lacking. In design fiction literature, authors often engage in critiquing techno-centric approaches while paying less attention to how design fiction has a potential to foster social change in situated actual affairs. We argue that analysis should start from the messy unfolding of the design event itself rather than from big ontological discussions of the boundaries between fiction and reality. To grasp the messiness of design fiction, we offer an interdisciplinary framework, bridging knowledge domains such as literally theory and design anthropology.

Possible worlds

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph Melia
Keyword(s):  
Modal Logic ◽  
Actual World ◽  
Possible Worlds ◽  
Abstract Objects ◽  
Causal Powers ◽  
Possible World ◽  
Space And Time ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Concrete Objects

The concept of Possible worlds arises most naturally in the study of possibility and necessity. It is relatively uncontroversial that grass might have been red, or (to put the point another way) that there is a possible world in which grass is red. Though we do not normally take such talk of possible worlds literally, doing so has a surprisingly large number of benefits. Possible worlds enable us to analyse and help us understand a wide range of problematic and difficult concepts. Modality and modal logic, counterfactuals, propositions and properties are just some of the concepts illuminated by possible worlds. Yet, for all this, possible worlds may raise more problems than they solve. What kinds of things are possible worlds? Are they merely our creations or do they exist independently of us? Are they concrete objects, like the actual world, containing flesh and blood people living in alternative realities, or are they abstract objects, like numbers, unlocated in space and time and with no causal powers? Indeed, since possible worlds are not the kind of thing we can ever visit, how could we even know that such things exist? These are but some of the difficult questions which must be faced by anyone who wishes to use possible worlds.

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