WAYS OF WORLDS I-II Edited by 'Possible worlds' have been one of the true conundrum notions in philosophy. On the hand possible worlds have proved very useful in philosophical logic for obtaining significant formal results with sunbstantial philosophical import. Yet on the other they have generated much noise and commotion in especially metaphysics and epistemology. From a logical point of view they are useful tools or conceptual constructions, from a philosophical point of view troublesome entitites generating endless discussions. Since the birth of Kripke-semantics, possible worlds have however largely been the preferred framework for doing modal logic. In standard Kripke-semantics possible worlds are taken to be unanalyzable primitives complete in the spatio-temporal history. Furnishing these fundamental entitites with different interpretations the familiar alethic, temporal, epistemic, deontic, and other modal logics are obtained. Relying only on Kripke-semantics has shortcomings both in theory and for applications. By way of
example, multi-modalities are hard to implement in the standard setup,
but multi-modalities are crucial for modelling in game theory,
theoretical computer science, social software, methodology, etc.
Philosophers, economists, mathematicians, computer scientists and
linguists have in recent years developed rich formal models diverging
significantly from the classical possible world semantics. Besides
having turned the study of 'possible worlds' into an interdisciplinary
affair, these models have The purpose of these two special issue of Studia Logica is twofold: To track the formal and philosophical history and development of possible worlds semantics; and to demonstrate how alternative approaches in philosophy, computer science, economics and mathematics have come together to form theoretically as well as practially richer, and philosophically less trouble-some notions of other states of affairs. Contributing Authors AND TABLE OF COMTENTS VOLUME 1 - WAYS OF WORLDS I / MARCH 2006 0.
V.F. HENDRICKS, S.A. PEDERSEN / Introduction 0.
V.F. HENDRICKS, S.A. PEDERSEN / Introduction
|