Modal Logic and Contingent Existence (Generality and Existence 2)

January 2025

Modal Logic and Contingent Existence (Genreality and Existence 2), article in progress for Australasian Philosophical Review

In this paper, I defend contingentism, the natural idea that some things exist contingently. Had my parents not met, I would not have existed. It is perhaps surprising that an everyday idea like contingentism needs defence, but natural reasoning principles concerning possibility and necessity on the one hand, and the existential and universal quantifiers on the other, have led some to necessitism, the alternate view, that everything that exists, exists necessarily.

Almost all recent work on the semantics of possibility, necessity and the quantifiers—and its metaphysics—makes essential use of possible worlds models. These models have proved useful for analysing the formal and structural properties of modal logics, but it is less clear that these models help fix the meaning of our modal vocabulary, given that we have no grasp of what counts as a possible world independent of our grasp of what counts as possible. In this paper, I develop an alternate inferentialist semantics for the modal and quantificational vocabulary, not as a rival to possible worlds models, but as an explanation of how it is that the concepts we do employ can be modelled using possible worlds. I then use this inferentialist semantics to clarify the contingentist’s commitments, and offer answers to necessitist objections.


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I’m Greg Restall, and this is my personal website. I am the Shelby Cullom Davis Professor of Philosophy at the University of St Andrews, and the Director of the Arché Philosophical Research Centre for Logic, Language, Metaphysics and Epistemology I like thinking about – and helping other people think about – logic and philosophy and the many different ways they can inform each other.

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