Wolfgang Schwarz

"Everytime an author writes a novel, new entities pop up in this fictional realm"

Why not say that the author merely names a fictional character? So its kind of contingent apriori that the character that Doyle names 'holmes' is holmes, as its contingent that Doyle named the character he did, but apriori that whichever character he names 'holmes' is holmes. The character still exists though, and what the author does is perform the naming ceremony.

Even if you dont believe in fictional characters, but do believe in stories, the same issue regenerates. What about the counterfactual "if doyle hadnt had written the holmes stories, those stories wouldnt have existed". In inclined to think that stories are better off than characters, which i'd like to reduce to roles or something like that. But again, the stories would have still existed, its just that Doyle wouldnt have performed the naming ceremony, so we wouldnt have had the name we actually have to refer to them.

Are you suggesting that a better account of fictional characters than van Inwagen's would say that fictional characters are not created, but only named, by authors? If yes, I agree (and I've written about this a while ago).

But that's kind of peripheral to the point I tried to make, which is that certain worries are incoherent *if* one accepts van Inwagen's account.

yeah, that was what i was getting at. sorry i hadnt read the earlier post.

Just a comment about section 4. once we have the recombination principle, dont we know that there arent only 17 words, because we know that there are at least as many worlds as the power set of the actual continuum? true, we dont know exactly how many there are, but we know the lower bound.

Right. But, one might ask, how do we know the recombination principle is true? Van Inwagen probably thinks it's false.

To this I think a good answer is that possible worlds are simply defined so that if they exist at all, the principle is true. Here is one of Lewis's definitions:

"By 'other worlds' I mean other things of a kind with the world we are part of: concrete particulars, unified by spatiotemporal unification or something analoguous, sufficient in number and variety to satisfy a principle to the effect, roughly, that anything can coexist with anything."

The definition ends with "anything", not with "analogous", I think.

why do you think that van inwagen would think the recombination principle is false? The recombination principle as given in Lewis is just an attempt to cash out the famous Humean denail of necessary connections between distinct existences. Suppose we start with Lewis's formulation of the principle (im following the literature in this formulation cf. for instance, Divers (2002)):

For any n, For any (worldbound individual) x, For any (worldbound individual) y, if x and y are distinct, then there is a world containing n intrinsic duplicates of xand n+1 intrinsic duplicates of y (if there is a spacetime big enough to hold them all).

The thing which will bother actualists, like van inwagen, about this formulation is that it is written into the formulation that worlds are sums of spatio-temporally related individuals, and that there are non-actual individuals that are parts of these worlds. Which is just to say that the formulation assumes Lewis's actualistically unacceptable metaphysics.

But, and this is something that has been eating up my time recently, we can come up with an actualistically acceptable formulation of the Lewisian principle viz.

For any n, For any x, For any y, If x and y are distinct, there there is a world AT which there are n intrinsic duplicates of x and n+1 intrinsic duplicates of y (if AT THAT WORLD, There is spacetime big enough to hold them all).

Where crucially, AT WHICH THERE ARE is a certain non-factive operator. Since the operator is non-factive, my formulation does not commit one to the existence of non-actual individuals, and does not assume that worlds are sums of spatio-temporally related individuals. So the formulation is actualistically acceptable. Hence, there are readings of the recombination principle which are actualistically acceptable, so van inwagen shouldnt be too bothered about the recombination principle.

This is sketchy, but i would be dead interested in any comments you have, since i have been working alot of actualistically acceptable formulations of Lewis's principles, and i think that the availablility of such formulations shows whats wrong about alot of arguments in the literature.

Is that Divers's formulation of the recombination principle? It looks rather unsatisfactory to me. Suppose, for instance, that our world is a world of eternal recurrence. Then that principle is compatible with the Megarian view that our world is the only possible world. Surely the recombination principle should rule that out.

But anyway, have people really objected to the principle because it seems to presuppose modal realism? In response to such objections, your answer seems perfectly correct to me.

The main reasons I had in mind for rejecting the principle are quite different. For a first reason, suppose we believe in states of affairs: At exactly those worlds where individual x has property P, there exists a state of affairs [Px], which is a kind of un-mereological fusion of x and P. Now one might hold a theory of un-mereological fusions on which any intrinsic duplicate of [Px] contains (as an un-mereological part) an intrinsic duplicate of x which is P. Then let Q be a property that is incompatible with P, and suppose x is P at some world and Q at another. By the principle of recombination it would follow that at some world there exist intrinsic duplicates of both [Px] and [Qx], meaning that at this world, an intrinsic duplicate of x is both P and Q, which, by assumption, is impossible. At this stage one might of course reject the sketched theory of un-mereological composition. But one might just as well blame the recombination principle.

The second reason is more relevant to my above posting: The principle of recombination (unlike the principle you cited) probably rules out a necessarily existing God. But some people believe that God does indeed exist necessarily. Similarly, van Inwagen believes that it is impossible for people to suffer without their suffering serving a good end. But it seems plausible that such a world can be reached via recombination. Van Inwagen doesn't consider this line of response, but he considers the response that it just seems intuitively obvious that there are such worlds. To which he replies that we have no reason to trust our facultiy of modal intuition in anything but the most trivial cases.

Van Inwagen's position is somewhat eccentric, but I've often met people who would at least agree that while we have no good reason to *reject* the recombination principle, we also have little reason to accept it, given that we lack any comprehensive and direct insight into the modal realm. That the principle is compatible with actualism doesn't help much in this case.

I dont follow the concern about eternal recurrence. The principle i stated entails that there is a world containing a single duplicate of me, and nothing distinct from that. our world, whether is an eternal recurrent world or not, is not such a world. So, the principle is inconsistent with the idea that ours is the only possible world.

As for the god worries, i dont see why the principle need be in tension with that. for it is only if god is taken to be a worldbound individual that the principle applies. So the principle only applies to things that are parts of worlds, and it appears unorthodox to me to think that if god exists then god is such a being.

Lastly, i dont know what to make of unmereological composition. But perhaps ive read to much Lewis on this ;-)

Ah, well, the principle you cited doesn't say that the world containing n times x and n+1 times y contains nothing else. So I took it that it might also contain infinitely many more x's and y's, as well as all the other stuff in our world of eternal recurrence.

It's interesting that you find a world-bound concepton of God unorthodox. It seems to me on the contrary quite obvious that various Gods exist at various worlds, and fail to exist at other worlds, just as people and stones do. So if people and stones exist at worlds by being world-bound parts of those worlds, then why not Gods? Would God on your view be an overlapping part of several worlds, literally identical across them all?

(It also seems a little dangerous to rely on world-boundedness in the principle: People who believe in literal trans-world-identity might conclude that the principle is altogether empty.)

Wo, your last post highlights some interesting things about Lewis's semantics for interpreting claims like

"at w, numbers exist"

Lewis's view is that numbers are not individuals, but worlds are individuals. Individuals have only other individuals as parts, for Lewis. So worlds dont have numbers as parts. So we cant analyse the 'at w' modifer mereologically, as Lewis wants to do so for ordinary individuals (the claim that 'at w, there are blue swans' is analysed as 'some blue swan is part of w'). Interpreted mereologically, the claim that 'at w, there are numbers', is false. So what are we do?

Here i am inclined to think that the 'at w' modifier should be interpreted as semantically redundant (in this im with Divers (1999, 2002)). So 'at w, there are numbers' just means that unrestrictedly, there are numbers.

I'd like to treat claims about god in a similar way. On the redundancy scheme, its true that god exists at all worlds, but all that means is that god, unrestrictedly, exists. So in response, i agree that if god exists, its uncontroversial that he exists 'at' many worlds. But that shouldnt be confused with the claim that god is *part* of many worlds. Similarly, i take it as uncontroversial that numbers exist 'at' worlds, but that shoudlnt be confused with the claim that numbers are parts of worlds.

I have a draft of a paper on the ins and outs of this translation scheme in relation to Gideon Rosen's arguments in 'a study in modal deviance' if your interested.

I didnt follow the point about the restriction to worldbound individuals. Could you expand?

So you believe that God necessarily exists? That seems a very peculiar position to me. In fact, I've tried to argue in the post we're commenting on that this belief is incoherent. Or do you only want to suggest that *if* there is a necessarily existing God, then he should be treated like a number, not like a world-bound individual, so that he wouldn't undermine the recombination principle? But isn't that a little ad hoc? If contingently existing Gods are allowed (and required) to be world-bound, then why not a necessarily existing God? Indeed, if the necessarily existing God = Jesus Christ, it seems plain that God is a mereological part at least of this world.

I agree that talk about numbers raises tricky and interesting questions. I sort of hope that it's possible to account for it without resorting to multiple "at w" operators. The basic idea is to reduce all mathematical truths to modal truths about ordinary possibilia. Then "necessarily, numbers exist" becomes an instance of iterated metaphysical modalities, and for whatever reason these always collapse. I believe that's very close to Lewis's own position in his last years, but admittedly not to his position in 1986. It also very elegantly solves Rosen's worries, I think. Perhaps some day I'll write an entry on this. In the meantime, I'm of course always interested in papers and ideas on these matters...