Possibilities

Abstract

Among the entities that natural language quantifies over are those which can be called intensional entities. These are things like possibilities, cases, circumstances, situations, and, of course, possible worlds themselves; and they are united in that they are all used to articulate talk about what might have been, even if it is not actually so. In the last chapter I used possibilities as an illustration of entities of this kind, and argued that the prima facie quantification over these entities in ordinary language is indeed genuine. This was intended to give further support to the argument of Part I that natural language quantifies over possible worlds, and in this chapter I wish to address the question of whether possibilities are the same as worlds. I shall argue that possibilities are at least sets of worlds, and perhaps are just single worlds, though on the latter question the evidence is not conclusive and points in both directions.