What are Possible Worlds?
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- Опубликовано: 28 фев 2024
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This is a video lecture in a course on the philosophy of language. It explains possible worlds, rigid designators, and non-rigid designators using some basketball examples involving LeBron James and Mt Everest and some other stuff. Even though the idea of possible worlds goes back to Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, this short video is specifically designed to provide the background necessary to understand Lecture 2 of Saul Kripke's famous work, Naming and Necessity.
Candide is a French satirical novel written by Voltaire in 1759. It is a savage denunciation of metaphysical optimism that proclaims that all disaster and human suffering is part of a benevolent cosmic plan. The story follows a gentle man who, despite being pummeled and slapped in every direction by fate, clings desperately to the belief that he lives in "the best of all possible worlds." The novella has been widely translated, with English versions titled Candide: or, All for the Best (1759), Candide: or, The Optimist (1762), and Candide: Optimism (1947). Voltaire wrote the novel in three days, and it has been a gayer place for readers ever since.
I think Candide went beyond a denunciation of optimism. It was an absurdist view of reality that tried to show that nihilism is the only interpretation of reality that makes any sense. Things happen without any reason, and there is no meaning or purpose.
@heusZandski There is no grounds for painting Voltaire as a nihilist. He was a Rationalist and a Deist. He was a primary exponent of Enlightenment Philosophy, which is the very essence of optimism. This disqualifies him as a nihilist on three counts. Satire is not denunciation outright. It is exposition, critique, and explication through humor. Satire is highly contextual. It is a cultural phenomenon.
Most people really don't get satire. They choose to read it as nihilism. This is common in regard to the modern reading of Dante's Divine Comedy. In fact it was a brilliant vehicle for taking the piss out of the whole panoply of prominent persons of the time without being banished by some Prince or Pope.
I contend that "possible worlds" are a great French literary contribution with roots clear back to the Arthurian Legends, and later to the popular travel novelas upon which Swift modeled his Gulliver's Travels. Voltaire, Balzac, and even Jules Verne drew inspiration from this genre.
Ô malheureux mortels ! ô terre déplorable!
Ô de tous les mortels assemblage effroyable!
D'inutiles douleurs éternel entretien!
Philosophes trompés qui criez: « Tout est bien »,
Accourez, contemplez ces ruines affreuses,
Ces débris, ces lambeaux, ces cendres malheureuses,
Ces femmes, ces enfants l'un sur l'autre entassés,
Sous ces marbres rompus ces membres dispersés;
Cent mille infortunés que la terre dévore,
Qui, sanglants, déchirés, et palpitants encore,
Enterrés sous leurs toits, terminent sans secours
Dans l'horreur des tourments leurs lamentables jours!
Poème sur le désastre de Lisbonne
Voltaire, 1756
Candides best of all worlds is ironic as it’s his only.. right? Philosophically tho it’s with Camus
@@andybandyb Candide is Voltaire's only elipse? That is not a complete thought. If there can be such a thing as a factoid then what you have written is a thoughtoid. That is irony.
Voltaire and Camus are products of utterly different worlds separated by several generations and most importantly the Great War!
I read Camus body of work as a flippant and fascile attempt to slap a bandage on the psychic wound of WWI. Yes, I take his nihilism to be smug and adolescent. Albert Camus is not worthy of being mentioned in the same sentence as Voltaire. That is irony.
Voltaire is an exponent of the great Western Canon. Camus is a post war reactionary desperately seeking succor at Freud's tit. There is no sustenance or substance there, IMO. Of course that was before "chest feeding" was dreamed up by corporate pharma. This is ironic too.
In a very palpable sense, the Western World has simply never come to terms with the Great War. The gaping maw of avarice and collective naivite continue to eat at the foundations of our civilization. Such malicious wanton destruction in the service of some collective madness cannot be reconciled with the relentless optimism of Enlightenment Values.
The Great War diminished us. It continues to do so today. I suggest that this is the critical failure that permits us to accept something as stupid as a policy of "endless warfare", an endless list of wars in serivce of industrial and financial necessity chewing up and spitting out one generation after another to infinity.
Na there’s no world where Draymond keeps his composure
Love your videos Jeffrey, I think to be able to teach is a gift, not only to be able to make someone absorb information but to transmit the passion and the interest for the discipline, I encourage you to keep going! It had been a while since I watched new videos and I think the imagery from editing makes the ideas easier to follow. I personaly feel that zooming in ends up cutting out the rest of the board and making it a little bit too cut-up, the slower pace, almost classroom-ish vibe was really tender and accessible. Love your work.
As a nonnative english speaker who is fed up with hectic college routine, I can follow your train of thought smoothly even though my english sucks and I don't major in philosophy.Shoutout to your articulation and explanation skills!
I am a physicist and I really enjoy your videos, especially this kind of videos where physics and philosophy inrtersect
how so physics?
@@Mai-Gninwod I am guessing the reference is to the multiverse theory (multiple universes, but equivalent to philosophical multiple worlds).
@@Hfil66 Right. This has absolutely nothing to do with multiverse theory though. Physicists think those universes actually exist. In philosophy they are just deployed as like... hypotheticals? Not the same thing at all. I know you are not the one who claimed they were.
I'm not sure I understand rigid designation. Or, more specifically, I'm unclear about when something is the same object between worlds. I mean, there's going to be a gradient of differences regarding features and contexts across worlds. So how is it possible for there to be a fact of the matter about where the line is that's separating what variation counts as the same object from what variation counts as a different object?
I think according to Kripke you just have to stipulate identity. If you say, "Imagine a world in which Nixon lost the 1972 election" then in that world it is actually Nixon that lost the election, simply because you have said so, or that is what you have imagined. On this view possible worlds are not things that are out there where you can go and check that that Nixon is the same as our Nixon. He is the same simply becase that's what is stipulated when we imagine that world.
But if you say, "Imagine a world in which the winner of the 1972 election lost the election" then that doesn't make sense. The phrase "winner of the 1972 election" is not a rigid designator and can't mean the same thing in every possible world.
There must be limits. You can't say "Imagine a world in which Nixon is a lump of coal", because then you really can't be talking about Nixon any more. But I'm not sure that there can be any hard and fast rules here.
Really that's a matter for metaphysics. That is to say, your answer to that particular question says a lot about your metaphysical theory/beliefs. There are other matters metaphysical, but "where the line is that's separating what variation counts as the same object from what variation counts as a different object" you might recognize as being the discussion over the Ship of Theseus.
Yes, one way of looking at it might be by saying, what if Gloria Marie James named her son "Anthony McClelland Jr.". Then we would have to argue, well, he's the LeBron James of that world because he was "the son of Gloria Marie James", "2016 NBA Finals MVP", etc., e.g. by referring to non-rigid designations. Then maybe the rigid designation in that sense could be non-rigid.
You don't even have to bother with other worlds. Are you the same person/object you were .00005 seconds ago? How about 20 minutes ago? 3 years? 15 years? What variation counts as the same object and what variation counts as different objects?
@@donaldb1 presumably Nixon would have been the same in both worlds until he lost the election in the other world, at which point the two Nixons couldn’t possibly be the same person from an experiential standpoint.
I appreciate, as always, the clarity and concision in exposition, but I find that: by going by way of Kripke, and saving Lewis for some other time, the focus stays on the periphery: rigid designators are important to possible world semantics, but they arguably matter less than questions of identity and similarity (a big issue in Lewis); and the distinction between de re (a word that refers or denotes) and de dicto (a description) can operate independently of possible worlds theory (i.e., de re/dicto could have surfaced in a possible world in which there were no possible worlds). And, of course, missing is how it all started, at least in the 20th century: modal logic, modal/intensional operators, and the difference between possibility and necessity in semantics and truth conditionals...
curious what you mean by saying "a possible world in which there were no possible worlds". how can I make sense of that more clearly?
Hi Jeffery, it's great to see another presentation. I've enjoyed al your others. In fact I've enjoyed them many times and I would love to see more; thank you for all those that you have done. I've learnt so much that I didn't know I didn't know. Cheers🙏🙏
I love your videos. Do you have a general time line of when your book is going to go on sale and what aspect of philosophy will it cover?
I enjoy your videos, which I watch while working out. I rarely read books. Thanks!
Hi, thanx for these videos. Insightful stuf. Could you talk a bit about the word "possible" in possible worlds?. Does it actually have to be possible? Or can it just be something that is made up, or thought of or said. I feel that some people use the term to suggest that something is plausible or could have existed, whilst they have not yet shown their "possible world" is actually possible or could actually have existed. Are their philosophical rules for "possible"?
Your stuff is great
People beginning philosophy need to start with clarity before they read
I read naming and necessity many times without guidance and sorting out the argument was challenging
I'm not convinced alternate worlds is a coherent concept
Another way to think about this to ask if one makes a movie of the world how a rigid designator, or detachment works by making the movie. Instead of saying something about Lebrun James one performs upon the movie the same things. So what is a rigid designator inside the movie frame. If language has worlds apart does a movie have worlds apart. The challenge is in the movie to use the pictures in a language like way.
Could you say a world in which the Himalayas are called something else disproves rigid descriptors being unchanging, or does the fact that I still had to reference the Himalayas prove it more?
I was thinking something as simple as, "what if in another world everything was identical except Mr and Mrs James decided to name their son Robert?"
That's a matter of what language you are speaking. One of Kripke's favourite examples is Richard Nixon (he was writing in the 70s). He says there could be a possible world in which Nixon was not called Nixon, but he would still _be_ Nixon. What this means is that we can imagine that the person we think of as Richard Nixon could have been called something different (maybe if his mother had divorced and remarried, and Richard took his stepfather's name). But would still be the same man as (the person that we call by the name) Richard Nixon.
@@donaldb1 but then you’re describing a non-rigid designator of the man we know as Nixon…
I was thinking it had to be rigid in relation to our world… using our world as a source of truth for these definitions… but that would mean that it’s relative, which would make the references more complicated 😅
@@anastasiya256 Yes, I think that's right. It's all tied to Kripke's theory of how names refer in language. Some people think that what the name "Richard Nixon" really means is a concept that we have of a person who did and said such and such, but Kripke would say no, "Richard Nixon" means a particular human being. He was baptised with that name as a child and everyone else has used that name for him ever since. He could have been called something else, but he would still have been the same child, the one we, in the actual world, call Richard Nixon.
You see more where Kripke's going with this when you realise he applies this to general terms, as well as proper names. For instance, gold has the atomic number 79. Someone might say, "Imagine a world in which gold had an atomic number of 78", but Kripke would deny that was possible. In our language "gold" refers to that particular substance, which we know has an atomic number of 79. There could be a possible world in which the name "gold" was used to refer to a different material, but then it wouldn't really be gold, as we understand it. In our language, "Gold has an atomic number of 79" is necessarily true, i.e. true in every possible world (because "gold" is a rigid designator). The idea that there could be necessary truths that can only be discovered by science, rather than by pure logic, was I think new to Kripke and quite radical. It leads him into a sort of metaphysical essentialism which is rather controversial.
Babe wake up! New Jeffrey Kaplan video just dropped!
Can you make some lecture videos on the philosophy of science? I'm interested in hearing your explanations of the works of Karl Popper or Thomas Kuhn. I've watched all of your video lectures multiple times over and I love this content. I'm not even a philosophy major
Hey, Jeffrey! Good video!
I am a brazillian fan and truly enjoy your effort and your work here. I would like to read your book, but, unfortunely, the price for a ship between you and me would be a magnanimous overpriced proceedment. I would like to know if your book is going to have a digital version.
Love from BR.
Interesting, but the only problem is eventhough the concept of possible worlds is open and limitless (one could think of N number of worlds with N number of possibilities) its still bound by the idea of actual world for example when you talked about Mt Everest in non-rigid designator possible world its still a mountain somewhere else, why couldn’t it be a type of humanoid race or a flower so I think its not truly the non-rigid designator possible world if the characteristics of the actual world still apply in any way. We talk about alien life and the possibility/probability of its existence somewhere in the universe because the sheer size of the universe and statistically it’s possible but we mostly think of some sort of carbon based organism just like earth, there is a possibility of silicon based life according to recent study. I don’t know how it can work, would it have conscious or something similar? If it has conscious does it mean they have same human type emotions as well? Even though philosophy is the base of everything (the idea of chair came first to someone before making of first chair) it is still somewhat bound to our limited experiences. A little off topic but I am from India and in Hinduism there’s a beautiful yet scary concept of “Gyan” (acquired knowledge or able to be obtained which we are aware of and can be learnt-taught) “Agyan” (aware of it but lack of knowledge or yet un obtained / unknown but can be known) and “Agyey” (this is scary- it basically mean it cannot be obtained simply because we don’t know it exists) - apology for my english its my second language.
sir can you make video on Hegel dialectics and his work .!!! thanks
Probably not because he is an analytic philosopher and they don't usually study Hegel
So, it seems to me that the only expressions that are actual rigid designators are the ones that mention the referent's world. For instance, "This world's Mt. Everest" is a rigid designator, but "Mt. Everest" isn't since it refers to different things in different worlds.
What makes World-12309832's Mt. Everest still count as the referent in the expression "Mt. Everest" uttered in World-7?
Whatever uniquely identifies this world's Mt. Everest can't be in any other world. And whatever doesn't uniquely identify a single entity is necessarily a non-rigid designator.
By your logic, you could also say that the only expressions that are actual rigid designators are the ones that mention the referent's world *at an exact instant in time*. Mt. Everest is not a static, unchanging thing. Every nanosecond, its molecules and subatomic particles change positions. In longer time scales, snow falls on the mountain, birds poop on it, water carries dirt away from it, and so on. In even longer time scales, the tectonic forces keep pushing the mountain up.... etc etc etc.
it's never good to define something in such a strict and rigid way (pun intended) that it loses all meaning or usefulness. Nobody would have any problem knowing what "Mt. Everest" means in "other worlds" that have such a thing.
@@davidonfim2381 , good points! But I'll bite this bullet.
Mt. Everest either is multiply realizable and therefore not a rigid designator or is not multiply realizable and can't change in time.
Since we will still call Mt. Everest Mt. Everest after it loses a grain of dirt, it's not a rigid designator and, you're right, we might have almost no use for the concept of rigid designator.
We shouldn't mourn the loss of a deceitful concept, though. If we are to be epistemically rational, we should place truth above usefulness and get rid of arbitrariness.
I sign under Amy Karofsky's necessitarian view. If there is a possible world in which I'm a dog, in which sense is this dog really me? Difference and identity are incompatible, as Leibniz probably would agree.
@@IntegralDeLinhaI don't think it's a deceitful concept, it's just that people misunderstand it. The word "rigid" doesn't mean absolutely 100% objectively immovable. A tree is a rigid object, but it still sways in the wind. I don't think the concept of a rigid designator was ever intended to be so absolute that it never applies to anything. Trying to use it that way just constitutes a straw man based on a false premise.
Truth and usefulness are not mutually exclusive, and the "usefulness" in question is in regards to our ability to determine the truth. You can't ever make progress towards determining a particular aspect of the truth if you are eternally side-tracked by semantic word games.
For example, I find it interesting that you keep using the "deceitful concept" of the self. You keep saying "I" this and "I" that. But that is a lie- "you" are not the exact same entity that "you" were .00000001 seconds ago, let alone 2 minutes ago or 5 hours ago. Same goes for nearly all of the words that you used- none of them are absolute, objective, eternal, unchanging concepts or free from "arbitrariness". So if we should overanalyze every single word instead of using the meaning that was intended and that everyone knows was intended, and we should discard everything that is arbitrary and potentially deceitful.... well, I think I will discard your whole comment :)
@@davidonfim2381 I agree that we shouldn't be so rigorous in our everyday conversations, but philosophy, on the other hand, is the place for formal rigour. At least if you're aiming at truth, not metaphor or something akin.
Btw, the word I is one of the very few actual rigid designators in my discourse. When I say I, I'm not referring to my persona. I'm not referring to my psychological self, to the set of my current beliefs, emotions, desires, dispositions, atitudes etc. When I say I, I'm referring to the owner of my perceptual field. I think this never changes.
As I see it, I have a perceptual field, constituted of a visual field, an auditory field, an olfactory field, a tactile field, proprioceptive field etc. My perceptual field is where all my experiences are represented. The experiences themselves change in time, but the subject of those experiences doesn't. When Descartes said "I think, therefore I am", he recognized 2 entities: the thought and the thinker. He uses the thought to infer the existence of the thinker. This thinker is what I call I.
I'm not my persona, I'm not my body, I'm also not my current experiences. I'm the subject of those experiences, the thinker.
Contrary to your belief, the thinker doesn't change. The reason I don't care if my beliefs, emotions etc. change is precisely because I am not them. That's why I don't cease to exist when my current set of desieres/beliefs/experiences ceases to exist. I'm not them. I persist through time. Or, at least, I have a strong intuition that I do.
So I is a rare literal rigid designator.
@@IntegralDeLinha 🤔 do you persist when you’re unconscious in your sleep or do you go out of existence for a time?
This is not a "philosophy of language", it's a manual for using ad-hoc nomenclature.
Also, there are no "possible worlds" that can be intelligibly discussed. Different initial conditions lead to different worlds, of which we cannot reliably say anything. We can, however, discuss fantasies (on various merits -- entertainment value, inventivness, consistency), but that's another matter altogether.
This.
I have _no_ idea if possible worlds, and the modal axioms used in philosophy have a meritorious use.
I do know that they have been employed extensively by apologists creating what are essentially convoluted, and fallacious arguments, leading to the ineluctable conclusion that they've demonstrated the empirical fact of the existence of their preferred deity existing in reality. These are presented as though they're intellectually honest, logically sound and academically rigorous triumphs, because holding a PhD in philosophy, and the nature of the subject, lends the air of legitimacy to the endeavor.
I've encountered numerous examples of apologists obfuscating their attempts to define their god into existence, by use of possible world semantics, and, I've found numerous examples of philosophers giving a brief description of possible worlds, that never seems to include any concrete information about the origination of the idea, aside from a mention that they can pertain to the concepts of the possibility, or necessity of something... somehow... I don't recall there being any mention of the philosophy branch(es) they were first intended for use within, or their current uses in philosophy, and within which branches...
Just brief examples of how possible worlds can be invoked as a way of entertaining fantastical ideas, that have no bearing upon reality.
Like a lot of ideas related to possible worlds, I feel like the concept of a rigid designator really falls apart if you think about it too much. The worlds should vary continuously, so there is no sharp cutoff where something goes from being the same object to being a different object. If LeBron James didn't win the 2016 championship it might have made a big difference to his life after that, so would he really be the exact same person as the LeBron in our world? What if the divergence happened much earlier and totally changed his whole life history, and maybe prevented him from getting into basketball at all? I think most people would agree that if a different sperm fertilized the egg and made a baby with totally different genetics then it wouldn't be the same person, even if they were still named LeBron James. And alternatively, if everything was the same except that his mother named him something different then all the non-rigid designators would be the same, but the supposedly rigid designator would have changed...
But there are many possible worlds where stuff other than LeBron James is different where the rigid designator in the strictest sense would apply. It doesn’t all have to be about LeBron, haha
But yeah, this seems like something that needs clarification 🤨
I'm not sure if you're into political philosophy, and this is a bit weird to ask, but can you make a lecture about Machiavelli's philosophy?
i really hope i win your book😭😭 after undergrad your videos helped me get into philosophy and scratch an itch in my brain that wasn’t being scratched
Check out, He Walked Around the Horses, by H Beam Piper for a fun exploration of the possible worlds idea. Also the rest of his Paratime stories.
Keith Laumer’s Imperium novels work with the same idea too.
Awesome video! Could you make a lecture on Humes problem with induction?
Using the @ for the actual world gives me roguelike vibes, where the @ is usually the playable character.
Just a heads up about your pronunciation of Aconcagua (not the point of the video, I know). It's pronounced more like "ah-kon-KAH-gwah". Your rendering of the pronunciation had me sniggering haha
Not sure how relevant this is, but there are two types of things we call “possible”. Claims and actions.
For example, we might say that it’s possible that the Riemann Hypothesis is true. There, the claim that the Riemann Hypothesis is true is the thing being called “possible”.
For another example, we might say that it’s possible to arrive at the party before John does. There, arriving at the party before John does (which is an action) is the thing being called “possible”.
To add on to this, before the Indian subcontinent had collided with Eurasia, I don’t believe that it would have been possible for it to not collide because we live in a deterministic universe.
So I’m not sure how useful this way of thinking in terms of “possible worlds” is.
@@raydencreed1524You’re kind of onto something. There are multiple types of possibility. The type talked about in this video is *metaphysical* possible, which is just sort of how things could have been in the most basic sense.
The sense in which the Riemann hypothesis *could* be true/false is what’s called *epistemic* possibility, i.e. what is consistent with your beliefs. Metaphysically, the Riemann hypothesis is either necessarily true or false, but epistemically for us it is neither necessary nor impossible.
The sense in which things have to be a certain way because of the laws of physics is *physical* possibility. But things that are physically impossible can still be metaphysically possible because the laws of physics could have been different.
Possible worlds are arguably the most influential development in philosophy in the last century, so there’s definitely a lot of use to them. I really recommend reading Naming and Necessity if you’re interested in this kind of thing.
@@Dere2727 Another thing I realized is that a claim being possible is really just a special case of a certain related action being impossible.
If we say that it is *possible* that Adam was at the party last night, what we’re really saying is that to know that Adam was *not* at the party last night is *not* *possible* .
@@raydencreed1524 that’s not entirely true, since in your example there is some possible world in which Adam wasn’t at the party and you knew he wasn’t there, so it is both possible to know he was there and possible to know he was not there.
It is true, though that when something is *necessarily* true, it is impossible for it to not be true
@@Dere2727 I’m not sure what you mean. I’m talking about a hypothetical situation in which we have a friend named John (or Adam, either way) who went to a party last night and in which we don’t know that.
In that situation, if we started to wonder (for whatever reason) whether John went to a party last night, either of us could utter the sentence “It *is* possible that John went to a party last night”.
What I’m trying to figure out is precisely what we’d be conveying by uttering that sentence. What would it mean for the claim that John went to a party last night to be *possible* ?
The answer I came up with is that what we’d be conveying could also be conveyed by the sentence “It is *not* *possible* to *know* that John did *not* go to a party last night”.
I *think* that those two sentences convey precisely the same thing.
In case it needs to be said, I’m not saying that they *basically* convey the same thing, or that we can derive one from the other, or that one conveys a consequence of the other. I’m saying that they convey *precisely* the same thing.
Maybe the several serious problems around Kripke's theory are also worth a video :) I just mention that Kripke refers to intiution no less than 48 times in the book, so what if others' intuitions about 'sameness' of stuff in different possible worlds are different form Kripke's, as later turned out they are? What if LeBron James was a car mechanic in Canada in a possible world of the height of 5'6"? How would that be the 'same' LeBron James? (Not speaking of the possibility of a possible world where LeBron James is a particulary intelligent octopus :) )
I have similar worries. It's not clear to me that an alternate LeBron James needs to have the same history or personality or genetics or the same parents. I'm not sure any particular thing in isolation, or any specific cluster, is necessary or sufficient for someone to be LeBron James.
Now we need a video about D. K. Lewis's Modal Realism.
The manner in which Jeffrey points at something is on point.
Extremely interesting!
Hearing him talk the big what-if of the 2016 NBA Finals and Draymond Green's composure is unexpected. But very graspable.
i like your hoops references philosophy man
What about "lebron James" in a possible world in which lebron's mother named him Mike instead?
Or what about the world where a different combination of egg and sperm produce a slightly shorter son which Lebron's parents decide to name LeBron. In that case is LeBron not a name but an alias for the definite descriptor describing LeBron's parents' son?
I hope you get a proof reader for the book. Your introduction > I am writing a book! If you to know when it is ready (and maybe ...
Thanks for catching that!
“In what world”
Nice 👍🏽
Is this sort of a signifier/sign situation?
as always so great
I cant remember watching somebody teaching so interesting but also irmative
Could you do something about marxism?
These videos are as good a resource for philosophy as they are for teaching philosophy!
What is the point of a philosophy channel where the comments on videos are turned off?
Great vid as usual, cut looks good too, excited about the book
Great analysis, however I think there’s no possible world where Draymond keeps his composure and doesn’t get suspended.
I recommend checking out the show Steins;Gate (it's an anime) that explores this theme of possible worlds.
The goat is back ❤
The best of all possible worlds is the world where I get a free copy of your book.
Possible worlds include worls where LeBron James was a girl, or simply was named Brown James or something else, or decided to play baseball or be a musician. He can have a different name and/or a totally diferent personality/life/genetics. Also, nothing deny the possibility of other complete different people sharing the same name. I don't accept these different versions to be the same LeBron James of this world. Worst, i don't think you can have real "rigid denominators" in the sense the concept was intended.
Software uses rigid and non rigid designators. Except they are called pointers and double pointers.
But wouldn’t rigid names only be rigid in relation to our world? (From the PoV of being inside our world, using it as a reference for standard?) Because there’s a possible world where the man who we know as LeBron James was named something else.
Mount Everest is the highest mountain on Earth but not the tallest. That's how it is. LeBron James does not become shorter than me when he enters water. "The tallest mountain in the world from base to peak is Mauna Kea, a long-dormant volcano in Hawaii, USA. In total, it is approximately 10,205m (33481 feet) in height, taller than Mount Everest's 8,849m (29032 feet). Over half of Mauna Kea is underwater in the Pacific Ocean."
Ok.
But then wouldn't you have to assume that the possible worlds are exact clones of earth? Mount Everest may have the same name, but it is not a clone of Mount Everest here on earth, and so you can't have a rigid designator, but it's just a designator to A mountain.
Yeah, like the Draymond who keeps his composure is a slightly different Draymond than the one we know here in our world. So at this point, it becomes a ship of theseus problem.
When a philosopher like this guy says it's possible that things could have been different how does he know? He can imagine that things could have been different but how does he demonstrate that what he imagines could actually happen? Inquiring minds want to know. How does he differentiate between imagination and reality?
Logical possibility or nomomlogical possibility?
@@robinharwood5044 Logical possibility is basically in the imagination. Actual possibility would be a subset of logical possibility. It is logically possible to imagine traveling faster than the speed of light through space but it doesn't appear to be actually possible. Although The actuality of the speed of light question is an empirical issue.
@@jjjccc728 So you are suggesting that it might only be logically possible that things could have been different?
@@robinharwood5044 Yes. If it's only logically possible then that reduces the meaning in my opinion. We are just talking fantasies then.
What’s your book about though
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Can the logically impossible happen in other possible worlds?
David Lewis eventually says no, in On the Plurality of Worlds, but in his earlier book Counterfactuals he gave, I think, a more satisfying answer: he says, yes our sense of what is impossible can be possible or true in another world, but it's vacuously true. In other words: there can be a possible world whereby, if p + 1 is a prime number, then pigs can fly (his example). That's nonsense in our world; but it could be meaningful and true in some other world... but then Lewis says, ok, who cares? It's true, but it's vacuously true... It's empty. It doesn't teach us anything that makes any sense to us... It's sort of a pragmatist answer, but one I find hard to disagree with... (By "pragmatist" I mean the philosophy of pragmatism, which sometimes has been at loggerheads with analytic philosophy...)
But what about the world where LeBron James has a different name and someone else is named LeBron James?
Always interesting
I don't see why rigid names should be rigid. I mean, maybe we called Mount Everest Mount Everest because it was very high... Or maybe we have other languages in other worlds...
You have to think that, no matter what other languages they might speak in other possible worlds we speak in our language. You can have a possible world in which Mt Everest is called something different, but it would be still be the same as (our) Mt Everest.
"If only India hadn't collided with Eurasia." This is so encouraging.l to hear. All I hear from Americans using a past counterfactual conditional now is "If India didn't collide with Eurasia..." It's infecting UK English. Thank you for using the language accurately, along with your excellent exegesis.
Rigid designators don't work, because I can imagine a possible world where Steph Curry and LeBron James names are swapped and that other stuff happens so that The Warriors win so the LeBron James is still the 2016 NBA Finals MVP.
But genetically the guy named Steph Curry plays for the Lakers (or whatever team) and is "our" LeBron James. Or a world where the Highest Mountain is still called Mt. Everest (for historical reason) but geophysically is our K2. Hell, I can imagine a world where both LeBron James and Steph Curry are LeBron James. (identical twins separated at birth).
So rigid designators aren't so rigid except in a small subset of possible worlds. How can you even identify the corresponding entities when every possible relation or property could be different. Some entities could converge (like the multiple LeBron James, in the example. With people you could maybe use DNA, but that too could possible be different. You need some distance metrics, and as you made a graph across different worlds. One entity could drifty away from X while another (different entity) drifts closer. In which case you designate would switch. If you going to say were going to use the designator "Lebron" from what ever entity most closely matching LeBron (regardless of what he is called in that world). You have to have some metric and that metric might might not return a unique result.
1) I'm still not convinced that the idea of 'possible worlds' makes sense: do you have any videos taking about that?. 2) The talk about 'rigid designators' makes me think about the doctrine of True Names in various fantasy works. I'm not sure that concept makes sense either.
I'm also pretty sure that if other possible worlds exist the designator 'Le Brun James' isn't going to be rigid enough to produce a consistent result. The Le Brun James in our world, pleased with his MVP title, is a different person from the one in world (b) all disappointed and doubtless learning to feel philosophical. If I have a magical spell that calls up Le Brun James and it works across worlds I will either get a whole clutch of examples or the spell will return a null value.
(Yes, I think about spells as being like computer functions: it helps.)
I’m just here to recommend 2 more of Kripke’s books: “Wittgenstein: On Rules and Private Language” and perhaps the much less well known sequel to Naming and Necessity: “Reference and Existence.“ It’s like a trilogy of great modern philosophy.
It's as if non-rigid designators refer to an object in "social space" or something like that
I misspoke. They are more like variables with qualifiers. Whether or not they refer to anything depends on whether or not any objects exist that fulfill those qualities.
Is there a possible world in which Kripke was right?
The idea that there could be a rigid designator in another world seems rather contradictory. I would say it's impossible for there to be an absolute substantial term when comparing any two worlds. All of the things (experiences, thoughts, atoms) that make up our Le Bron James wouldn't be the same in the other world, so it's NOT Le Bron James.
If you want to say he's the closest thing that world has to our Le Bron James, that's about as much that could be said.
The current orthodoxy of Possible Worlds equates what is currently possible with what once was possible. In doing this it renders itself meaningless. Even if such modal logic really did have meaning (which it doesn't) , rigid designators themselves would still be meaningless, because words only have intention, they have no extension.
The human brain can handle future contingencies with no effort. It is all pretty much built in. The ability to consider different presents/pasts sort of flows down from the future contingency ability.
THERE IS ONLY ONE WORLD
Candide, terrified, amazed, desperate, all bloody, all palpitating, said to himself: "If this is the best of possible worlds, what then are the others!?"
"Candide, terrified, amazed, desperate, all bloody, all palpitating, said to himself: 'If this is the best of possible worlds, what then are the others?'"
Ok but whats the relevance of it?
Possibility needs to be demonstrated. Otherwise, it's imagination, right?
Every time I start a new civilization game.
What problem is the concept of possible worlds trying to solve?
Hm. This looks to me (a bike mechanic) like set theory for the mathematically inapt, like myself.
Fascinating as always, professor.
I don't believe in rigid designators, as normally understood. I think they're useful, but I don't think they make sense if pushed too hard. Something in one possible world is being thought of as the same entity as its counterpart in a different possible world, but really they're counterparts in different worlds. If I had stepped into something like a Star Trek transporter, and two individuals had appeared in two locations that could have been where I was transported to, both apparently identical to me and both claiming to be the one who stepped into the transporter, there's no good way of saying which one is me.
I would attack the concept of rigid designators as somehow being consistent in worlds where everything else is not. Why should that be the case?
It’s just WHAT IF but lots of variables coordinated together
Is it possible to have a possible world in which possible worlds are impossible?
Where does the multiverse fit into this?
That's a whole can of worms, but some might say the multiverse encapsulates all the different possible worlds... But then if you're thinking that possible world theory can illuminate, say, what's going on in Marvel films, then it's an ongoing debate... David Lewis, who wrote the book on possible worlds (and unwittingly inspired that film Everything, Everywhere... etc.) sometimes suggested yes, sometimes said no... Best bet would be to read up on modal fictionalism: see the Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy on that, and also, same site, on Lewis, Kripke and possible worlds...
What's your point?
His point is to explain an important concept of philosophy. The concept of possible worlds. Possible worlds provide a semantics for modal logic. If you're not interested in modal logic, then this video is probably not for you.
@@pillmuncher67 I guess modal logic is common sense to me.
@@_Hound_ Really? I find modal logic pretty confusing and not at all conforming to common sense. Take this formula (I'm using an example from deontic logic):
O(p -> q).
What does it mean? Let's say:
p := It rains.
q := I stay at home.
So the above formula translates to:
It ought to be that If it rains I stay at home.
But the formula:
p -> q
can be equivalently expressed as:
-q -> -p
So we should be able to transform the above formula to:
O(-q -> -p).
which translates to:
It ought to be that if I don't stay at home it doesn't rain.
So it says the weather ought to depend on my actions. That doesn't sound like common sense to me.
@@pillmuncher67 Blame it on the arrow of time.
Good teacher.
In the @ctual world I subscribed
What about a world in which you were assigned a different rigid designator at birth
Mt. Everest is not the tallest mountain on Earth. It's actually on the Big Island of Hawaii. Everest is the highest. Namaste 🙏 still love you bro.
Are there not likely to be plenty of possible worlds where LeBron James instead had a different name? It seems like his parents could have decided to call him Frank James, or some other thing, just as easily.
Are other possible worlds even possible?
Sure. Why not? I like a world with a police box that's bigger on the inside. If I'm offered a chance to go there I will.
But to speak seriously of other possible worlds it would seem you need to show that other worlds are possible. That any concept of rigid Fate is wrong, or any concept of universal causality. It's devilishly difficult to prove that anything could have happened in a way different that it did, or that some things might just be random or uncaused. Physicists in some fields have warmed up to the idea because it makes the math(s) work(s). But proof is another matter and not really their concern.
You can run the experiment by making a video of flipping a coin. It comes up heads. You can run that very exact same coin flip again by rewinding the video and watching it again. It will come up heads. No matter how many times you watch it. Despite the fact that if you perform multiple similar experiments by repeatedly flipping a coin it will tend to a 50 50 distribution of heads and tails. Perhaps that one original flip had to be heads, ever and always.
Maybe not. But prove it. That's devilishly hard.
Is The Doctor (Who) a rigid designator or a non rigid designator? There have been 15 Doctors (so far) of different ages, personalities, abilities, sexes, races and with different fashion senses. (16 if you count Peter Cushing movies, 17 for the stage actor, 18 for... etc.) But they are in some sense still the same person, only still totally different.
If you come from a culture that believes in reincarnation, and LeBron James dies and is reincarnated as a Chinese girl who loves baseball and plays on her university's baseball team (and of course isn't called LeBron James) is she still LeBron James? Is Lebron James then a rigid designator or not?
(Edit to fix an embarrassing "there concern" to the proper "their concern." Though perhaps in some possible world the spellings of 'there' and 'their' are reversed...)
you should did a video on Wittgenstein's later views on language
In whatever world you're in Larry Bird is still the greatest basketball player of all time.
He would also want to take on every other player in every other world in his prime
Shades of Sliders.
People in humanities should study more math, It's not obvious that accumulating luxury items is morally irrelevant, their value stays throughout time, their worth is capital. Also, you do not know how neuroscience opearates incentives and how things that people want make them prone to produce more. The absolutes you gave for granted in ordinary people (besides the first statement) are not absolute at all. Please be skeptical
What about the possible world where LeBron James changes his own name to something else?
These are Imaginary Worlds, there's no reason to suggest or believe that they are or ever were Possible.'
LeBron dunks.
What about the world where Lebron is 9-0 huh
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Does a rigid designator work for a world where James was injured at an early age and couldn't play basketball? What if his DNA glitched during development and he, say, was something like anencephalic and died shortly after birth?
Every photon from the sun hitting the earth is either reflected or not, each of those is a possible world, there are astronomical combinatorics here. Are each of these everettian universes? Every world with a sun would have such world-splitting, possible worlds, what to make of such utterly insignificant differences? Multiuniverse stories really fail in imagination.
Tell about rigid designarors to all John Smiths of the world.
Dude, put a whiteboard behind you so we can see what you're drawing on the Clear Panel in front of you.
Please not a white background, that reaps havoc when watching on big screen. This black is relaxing, just use something else than your miniphone