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Getting to the field site to study wild animals sets stringent limits on what can be done. Access to the seals at Año Nuevo Island from my university office was fast, inexpensive, and convenient but was adventurous and dangerous in the early years. The initial attempts to study the seals are described as well as monitoring the entire population by study of the largest extant rookeries. Field research at Año Nuevo was made easier when the seals started breeding on the mainland adjacent to the island. This change facilitated the long-term study of these animals, which is critical for a deep understanding of their natural history. Identifying individuals with marks, tags, or brands, as well as other manipulations such as measuring, weighing, and taking blood samples, was vital and the key start in determining the questions we could address and answer. We developed a system to identify individuals throughout their lives.
Possible worlds semantics have been widely applied both in philosophy and in other fields such as linguistic semantics and pragmatics, theoretical computer science, and game theory. This chapter discusses the general contrast between modal realism and actualism and questions about the kind of explanation that possible worlds provide for modal discourse and modal facts. It looks at Saul Kripke's views about how possible worlds are specified, in particular at the role of individuals in specifying possible worlds. A large part of the attraction of modal realism is that it purports to provide a genuine eliminative reduction of modality. Kripke thinks that the "distant planets" picture of possible worlds contributes to the illusion that there is a problem about the identification of individuals across possible worlds, and that is one of his main reasons for thinking that the modal realist doctrine is a pernicious one.
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