Impossible world
Term used to model separate circumstances that cannot exist together
In philosophical logic, the concept of an impossible world
is used to model certain
phenomena that cannot be adequately handled using ordinary possible worlds. An
impossible world, , is the same sort of thing as a possible world ,
except that it is in some sense "impossible." Depending on the context, this may mean that some contradictions, statements of the form are true at , or that the normal laws of logic, metaphysics, and mathematics, fail to
hold at , or both. Impossible worlds are controversial objects in philosophy, logic, and semantics. They have been around since the advent of possible world semantics for modal logic, as well as world based semantics for non-classical logics, but have yet to find the ubiquitous acceptance, that their possible counterparts have found in all walks of philosophy.
The public source identifies “Impossible world” as term used to model separate circumstances that cannot exist together. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Impossible, world and Term.
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This entry incorporates text from “Impossible world” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.