Theo Todman's Web Page - Paper Abstracts

Philosophers Index Abstract

1. Gideon Rosen, in his paper "Rosen (Gideon) - Modal Fictionalism" (1990) puts forward and defends what is intended to be an ontologically neutral alternative to modal¹ realism.
2. I argue that Rosen does not achieve this goal. His fictionalism² entails realism about possible worlds. Moreover, any attempts to modify the analysis results in an undesirable multiplication of the modal³ primitives, a problem faced by those who take the standard modal⁴ operators as primitive.