Ways a World Might Be

Stalnaker's 2003 essay collection on modality and modal metaphysics

Tradition: Analytic metaphysics / modal metaphysics / possible-worlds semantics

Stalnaker's 2003 essays on modal metaphysics — moderate modal actualism against Lewisian modal realism

Published by Oxford University Press in 2003, 'Ways a World Might Be: Metaphysical and Anti-Metaphysical Essays' collects fifteen Stalnaker papers on the metaphysics of modality across nearly thirty years (1976-2001). The book's central position is moderate modal actualism: only the actual world exists, but talk of possible worlds is indispensable for semantics and metaphysics, and a deflationary realism about possible worlds (as 'ways the world might have been') can be sustained without committing to David Lewis's plurality of concrete worlds. Major essays include: 'Possible Worlds' (1976, the founding statement of the moderate-actualist position against Lewisian modal realism); 'Reference and Necessity' (1997, on the Kripkean essentialist tradition); 'On What Possible Worlds Could Not Be' (1996); 'The Interaction of Modality with Quantification and Identity' (1994); and Stalnaker's most-discussed engagement with two-dimensional semantics — 'Conceptual Truth and Metaphysical Necessity' (2001), where he engages David Chalmers's two-dimensional semantic framework while resisting its modal-rationalist commitments. The collection also includes essays on the relations between modality and indexicality, the metaphysics of properties, and the philosophical interpretation of intensional logic. The book is Stalnaker's principal mid-2000s synthesis of his philosophy of modality and one of the major statements of moderate modal actualism in contemporary analytic metaphysics.