11.00 - 12.15pm (GM 452): Neil Barton, Perspectivism and semantic content
lunch
1.15 - 2.30 (GM 667): Bahram Assadian, 'The Indeterminacy of reference and de re beliefs'.
3:00 - 4.30: Ed Zalta (GM 652), “The Metaphysics of Possibility Semantics”
Authors: Edward N. Zalta and Uri Nodelman
Speaker: Edward N. Zalta
Abstract: Works by Humberstone (1981, 2011), van Benthem (1981, 2016), Holliday (2014, 2025), and Ding & Holliday (2020) attempt to develop a semantics of modal logic in terms of "possibilities", i.e., "less determinate entities than possible worlds" (Edgington 1985). These works take possibilities as semantically primitive entities, stipulate a number of semantic principles that govern these entities (namely, Ordering, Persistence, Refinement, Cofinality, Negation, and Conjunction), and then interpret a modal language via this semantic structure. In this paper, we *define* possibilities in object theory (OT), and *derive*, as theorems, the semantic principles stipulated in the works cited. We then raise a concern for the semantic investigation of possibilities without a primitive modal operator, and show that no such concerns apply to the metaphysics of possibilities as developed in OT.