The Genesis of Hi-Worlds: Towards a Principle-Based Possible World Semantics

Erkenntnis 76 (1):101-114 (2012)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

A Leibnizian semantics proposed by Becker in 1952 for the modal operators has recently been reviewed in Copeland’s paper The Genesis of Possible World Semantics (Copeland in J Philos Logic 31:99–137, 2002 ), with a remark that “neither the binary relation nor the idea of proving completeness was present in Becker’s work”. In light of Frege’s celebrated Sense-Determines-Reference principle, we find, however, that it is Becker’s semantics, rather than Kripke’s semantics, that has captured the true spirit of Frege’s semantic program. Furthermore, for Kripke’s possible world semantics to fit in Frege’s framework of senses , worlds and referents , it will have to be thoroughly reformulated. By introducing the notion of a hi-world into the picture, we manage to keep the key ingredients of Becker’s semantics intact, while at the same time solve a fatal problem that used to shadow Becker’s original semantics—it had not been able to make sense of inhomogeneous modality. The resulting generalized Beckerian semantics provides, in effect, a Beckerian analysis of the Kripkean possible worlds. It reveals the subtle hierarchical internal structure of a Kripkean world that has not been discovered before

Links

PhilArchive



    Upload a copy of this work     Papers currently archived: 90,616

External links

Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

Analytics

Added to PP
2011-10-20

Downloads
57 (#251,931)

6 months
4 (#320,252)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Author's Profile

Cheng-Chih Tsai
Mackay Medical College

Citations of this work

Strict conditionals.Jan Heylen & Leon Horsten - 2022 - Croatian Journal of Philosophy 22 (64):123-131.

Add more citations

References found in this work

The logical basis of metaphysics.Michael Dummett - 1991 - Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Abstract.[author unknown] - 2011 - Dialogue and Universalism 21 (4):447-449.
The genesis of possible worlds semantics.B. Jack Copeland - 2002 - Journal of Philosophical Logic 31 (2):99-137.
Logic, Language, and Meaning, Volume 1: Introduction to Logic.L. T. F. Gamut - 1990 - Chicago, IL, USA: University of Chicago Press.

View all 9 references / Add more references