Ewa Jonczyk
Published: 21 January 2019
My project aims to establish and evaluate the criteria used in philosophy to determine similarity relations between possible worlds.
University of Edinburgh
My project aims to establish and evaluate the criteria used in philosophy to determine similarity relations between possible worlds.
When thinking about the ways the world could have been, we might consider some possible worlds to be more similar to the actual world than others. Such a comparative similarity relation is expressed in terms of ‘closeness’ or ‘modal distance’ – the more a possible world resembles the actual world, the ‘closer’ we might say it is. This notion, which we may refer to as ‘modal proximity’, is frequently employed by philosophers across multiple disciplines, especially when engaging in counterfactual reasoning. Nonetheless, in spite of the significance modal proximity holds as a tool in philosophical discourse, we seem to lack reliable universal criteria for differentiating worlds that are ‘close’ from worlds that are ‘distant’.
The goal of my research is to assess what similarity between possible worlds means, how to quantify it, and whether the similarity metrics should vary across different contexts and different disciplines. To this end, I propose to survey the available suggestions for quantifying modal distance, to pinpoint their strengths and flaws, and offer a detailed set of proposals for applying modal proximity measures.
First published: 21 January 2019