Tim, I'm afraid I still don't understand you. On Mon, Aug 12, 2002 at 06:00:26PM -0700, Tim May wrote: > It is possible that WWIII will happen before the end of this year. In > one possible world, A, many things are one way...burned, melted, > destroyed, etc. In another possible world, B, things are dramatically > different.
Ok, but what about my point that you can state this by explicit quantification over possible worlds rather than using modal operators? I.e., "There exist a world accessible from this one where WWIII happens before the end of this year." instead of "It is possible that WWIII will happen before the end of this year."? > There can be no implication from one world to the other. That is, we > can't say "A implies B" or "B implies A." What does that have to do with my question? Anyway A and B are supposed to be worlds here, not propositions, so of course you can't say "A implies B". I don't know what point you're trying to make here. > This branching future is exactly what I was talking about a week or so > ago in terms of "partially ordered sets." If the order relationship is > "occurs before or at the same time as," which is equivalent to "less > than or equal to," A and B cannot be linearly ordered. In fact, since > both A and B are completely different states, neither can be said to be > a predecessor or parent of the other. In fact, A and B are not > comparable. I'm with you so far in this paragraph. > We cannot say "A or not-A." Now I'm lost again. Again A is a world not a proposition so what would "A or not-A" mean even if A and B are comparable? If anyone else understand the point Tim is making please help me out...
