The Ontological Status of Possible Worlds

Abstract

Barcan Formula and the postulation of possibilia contradict the pretheoretical intuitive judgments of most people, which favour actualism about possible worlds. In this paper I discuss and reject two arguments against such judgments, both of which conceive wrongly the relation between possible worlds semantics (PWS) and modal natural languages. The more important argument (advanced by Williamson) assumes that the domain of the actual world is identical to the domain of @ (the index that —in PWS— represents the actual world). I develop an interpretation of PWS which elucidates why that thesis is unwarranted.