Abstract

In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein maintains that “The world is all that is the case.” Some philosophers have seen an advantage in introducing into a formal language either a constant which will represent the world, or an operator, e.g., ‘Max’, such that indicates that p gives a complete description of the actual world, of the world at some instant of time, or of a possible world. Such propositions are called world propositions, possible world propositions, or maximal propositions. For us, a maximal proposition is a possible world proposition; it gives a complete description of one way the world might be. A maximal proposition p is not logically false, and for any proposition q, either p entails q or p entails not-q.