excerpt from my Possible World theory essay on: Alexius Meinong Ritter von Handschuchsheim and David Lewis



 "The prejudice in favour of the actual"


 In this essay I will discuss the claim that Lewis’s theory of existence is ‘just like Meinong’s’. It is not. Lewis does not believe in ‘different kinds of existence’, he believes in different places in existence; that possible objects/ entities that do not exist in our world do exist in possible worlds. 


Lewis is a possibilist. Lewis says ‘those things do exist, but do not actually exist’ 


Lewis does not opine that there are things that don’t exist. Lewis is a realist about possible worlds, he believes that possible objects such as a Unicorn can exist in possible worlds but impossible objects such as a square triangle cannot. 


Meinong believes possible, incomplete (objects that are undetermined with respect to at least one property) and impossible objects such as the square triangle have a quality of being. That it is, without having any instances. It is a possible object of thought and does not have the property of existing. Meinong treats existence as a property, though something is non-existent, it is thought to be in the realm of being, He says there are things that don’t exist. The square triangle has this property of being whether or not we ever think of it.


“Any subject of true predication is an object. “The square triangle is triangular so there is a square triangle- these objects are mind-independent, yet are all potential objects of thought”


 Aspects of Meinongian metaphysics are evident in Lewis’s theory but Lewis rejects heteroclite and incomplete Meinongian objects, however his existence claims may be in excess of that of a Meinongian. The concept that for every time I make a decision where there is more than one possible outcome. And every time every one else makes a decision for witch there is more than one possible outcome there is an infinite number of bifurcating universes to encom all these possibilities occurring in worlds with all other possibilities occurring in them is too fantastical to believe. Add to this the further philosophical claim that all of these infinite number of universes with their limitless possibilities have existed since the beginning of time and the theory borders on the ridiculous. The theory is only believable in my neophyte opinion if the number of worlds is finite. The main argument against Modal Realism is huge ontological excess.



Modal Realism is a form of possiblism. In it we “Analyse the meanings of modal claims using talk of possible worlds” and “Adopt realism about possible worlds”

A modal Realist says there are many possible worlds, that these worlds are spatial-temporally isolated from each other, therefore they cannot effect each other. Nothing we do can cause us to communicate with/have knowledge of/ travel to another possible world. All possible worlds exist independently of us, we neither cause them to exist nor sustain them in existence. They are all mind independent. They exist wether or not we think/ speak/ have knowledge of them. The possible worlds contrast not in type, but in content.


Lewis says there are things that exist which are not actual, meaning not existing in our world but existing in a possible world. We live in the actual world; the world ‘actual’ uttered by the inhabitants of any world is indexical and simply refers to the world of that particular inhabitant for that particular world. Possible worlds are not actual to us, but they are actual to the people in them. Each and every world is equally real. Every inhabitant of every possible world is living in an actual world; theirs. 


“When I profess realism about possible worlds, I mean to be taken literally. Possible worlds are what they are, and not some other thing. If asked what sort of thing they are, I cannot give the kind of reply my questioner probably expects: that is, a proposal to reduce possible worlds to something else.
 I can only ask him to it that he knows what sort of thing our actual world is, and then explain that possible worlds are more things of that sort, differing not in kind but only in what goes on at them.”


Lewis does not believe multiple existence theory. He does not say that there are a infinite amount of copies of ourselves in possible worlds. He believes individuals are world bound, he believes another world can contain a counter-part of some individual, someone very similar to someone but not the same someone.
Lewis believes that in each possible world there is a counterpart of each person (unless the person in that world had never existed, for example their counterpart grandparent had been killed in that possible world but not in their own) existing.
In the other world this counterpart differs from the first person in some way, it is not a copy of the person.



Lewis proposes an easy to understand list of criteria for his Modal Realism theory:



“1 Possible worlds (including our world) exist.


2 They are the same kind of thing as our world.


3 Possible worlds, like the actual world, cannot be reduced to anything else
.

4 There is nothing ontologically special about the actual world. Each world is actual to it’s inhabitants.


5 Actual is simply an indexical, like here.


6 Possible worlds are spatial- temporally isolated from each other, and hence causally isolated, from each other.


7 Possible worlds are not mind-dependent and objective independent- the worlds and their things exist regardless of weather or not we think of them/ talk about them.”



A modal realist can say Unicorns don’t exist while also saying Unicorns do exist, the Modal Realist means- Unicorns don’t exist in our world but they do exist in another possible world, Lewis would call this an example of a implicitly restricted quantification, common sense statements are mostly restricted to the actual world.
A Meinongian would say there are Unicorns.
We can know the meaning of a word without having it refer to something in existence, such as Unicorn, it still has meaning. The conditions for existence just have not been meet in our experience.

Meinongianism is an elaborate set of dogma about existence and predication; Betrand Russel said that Meinong is guilty of existential extravagance. He said that Meinong is confusing concrete reality with ideas. Most modern day philosophers do not hold with Meinong’s ideas on non-existent objects.


Meinongian’s believe that everything that exists is not all the things that there are. There are some things that do not exist, they have various properties. Existing is a (special) type of property. Lewis disagrees with this, he says a thing must exist in order for it to have properties. Meinong believes that existing is not a prerequisite for having properties. Quine, who writes at length about these philosophers also says existence is what you have to have to have or lack any property at all.


Meinongian’s believe there are mind independent, possible, impossible, and incomplete things such as a “square triangle, a golden mountain and something tall.”

“Everything is an object, whether or not it is thinkable (if an object happens to be unthinkable then it is something having at least the property of being unthinkable) and whether or not it exists or has any other kind of being.”


 Meinong would say of fantastical things such as a Unicorn or Superman, we can make true propositions of which these are the subjects; therefore they must possess some kind of logical being, since otherwise the propositions in witch they occur would be
meaningless, Superman must have some kind of existence for me to be talking about him.


“Hence from ‘Superman does not exist’, we are entitled to infer only ‘there is something which does not exist’. For defenders of the non- existent, this is not a contradiction: it is a truth! Many things lack the property of existence, and Superman is one of them”



For something to have being it does not need to be able to be located in space and time and be bodily. Things have a nature impervious to their existence or nonexistence. 


Bertrand Russel, who hates on Meinong states that the mere fact that a grammatical subject term is meaningful, and features in true, meaningful sentences, it does not follow that it refers to some thing. 


Bertrand Russel says possible entities’ existing in our minds is a failure of logic and reasonability. When we speak of the Unicorn idea we are not saying that Unicorns exist in reality, we are not saying that they are touchable, tangible. We are saying that what we consider a Unicorn to have is the properties of existing in our understanding. Something that exists only in the understanding is not necessarily real in the actual world/ reality.
I disagree with Russel.



Modal Realism and Meinongism are similar in that they both theorise vast possibilities, both Alexis Meinong and David Lewis as philosophers have focused on the possibilities of what there could be. Both have comprehensive, eclectic, and insightful, far out theories with many arguments against their logical possibilities. They both use restricted quantifiers. Both theories state that there are things not spatio-temporally physically connected to us. Both have a gargantuan ontology. They question our understanding and prod at our preconceived beliefs of possibilla and objects and our relation to them.


Both theories cannot be proven. They compliment each other in scholarly thought.