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Accessibility, Kinds, and Laws: A Structural Explication

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2022

Thomas Mormann
Thomas Mormann*
Affiliation:
Institut für Philosophie, Logik und Wissenschaftstheorie, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München
*
‡Send reprint requests to the author, Institut für Philosophie, Logik und Wissenschaftstheorie, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Ludwigstrasse 31, 80539 München, Germany.
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Abstract

“Accessibility” is a crucial concept of possible worlds semantics. The simplest approach to accessibility is the “magical theory” that construes this relation as analogous to spatial or temporal relations. In this paper I give a nonmagical structural account of the accessibility relation that can be used to give a necessitarian account of kinds and laws. Laws are characterized in a structural way as stable invariants of the world's gestalt. Finally, I point out how the structural approach can be embedded in a general representational theory of modality.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 61 , Issue 3 , September 1994 , pp. 389 - 406
Copyright
Copyright © Philosophy of Science Association 1994

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Footnotes

†

I thank Thomas E. Uebel for linguistic advice and some valuable suggestions.

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