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CHAPTER II: Representation of the Past and Possible Worlds
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29 chapter 2 Representation of the Past and Possible Worlds The present-day researcher is engaged in a desperate struggle with the information explosion. The struggle is especially taxing in interdisciplinary research, where no one can master all the published literature in all the interconnected fields. As interdisciplinary investigations become more and more necessary, they become more and more difficult. An easy way out of this difficulty is to interpret the problems of other disciplines in terms of one’s own, a practice typical of quite a few postmodern literary critics. While claiming to cultivate interdisciplinarity , they give philosophy, history, and even natural sciences a “literary ” treatment. The concepts popular in postmodern literary criticism, such as subject, discourse, narrative, metaphor, semantic indeterminacy, self-reference, ambiguity, and so on, are applied as a general theoretical framework. Epistemology becomes a clone of literary criticism. This purely verbal reformulation is then hailed as an interdisciplinary triumph of a fashionable critical trend. Interdisciplinary study governed by the conceptual system of postmodern literary criticism, while posing as a definitive divorce from positivism , presupposes, in fact, the positivistic “territorial principle,” that is, the division of cognitive activities into a hierarchy of specialized fields. Yet contemporary cognitive strategies transcend the traditional territorial divisions. While specialized disciplines continue their empirical research, most theoretical advances are achieved in transdisciplinary frameworks, in “hyphenated” sciences, such as psycho-linguistics or biochemistry , and in encompassing macrosciences—semiotics, cybernetics, ecological science. Interdisciplinarity is now primarily the formulation of transdisciplinary theories and the positing and testing of higher-order 30 possible worlds of fiction and history conceptualsystemsthatcutacrosstraditionaldisciplines.Onesuchcrossdisciplinary framework is the conceptual system of possible worlds.1 1. Possible Worlds Let us imagine a language that would give us direct access to reality. Every utterance in that language would produce or re-create that portion of the world, that actual object or state of affairs, that the utterance signifies. If by uttering the word child you produce and publicly display a child, nobody could deny that your language “hooks onto” reality. Alas, only a divine language, only a magic performative, can produce such special effects.2 While awaiting a new Prometheus who would steal the divine language for us, we are confined to human language, a language with a weak performative power: it can bring about certain changes in our human affairs, but it cannot create the actual world that exists and goes on independently of language and any other representation. The only worlds that human language is capable of creating or producing are possible worlds. This concept, I believe, is crucial for finding a new response to the postmodern challenge that denies the distinction between historical and fictional representations (see chapter I).3 The concept of possible worlds has a venerable philosophical history; today it is commonly associated with the seventeenth-century German rationalist philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. It was resurrected in the 1960s to provide a semantic interpretation of modal logic (Kripke 1963), and then it slowly penetrated the theoretical discourse of natural, social, and human sciences (see Allén, ed., 1989).4 In the process, the traditional concept had to be adjusted in light of its new tasks. The first adjustment concerns the origin of possible worlds. In Leibniz ’s metaphysical conception possible worlds have transcendental existence ; they reside in the omniscient divine mind. Contemporary thinking about possible worlds is not metaphysical. Possible worlds do not await discovery in some transcendent depository, they are constructed by the creative activities of human minds and hands. This origin of possible worlds was tersely expressed by Saul Kripke—“Possible worlds are stipulated, not discovered by powerful telescopes” (1980, 44)—and by M. J. Cresswell—“Possible worlds are things we can talk about or imagine , suppose, believe in or wish for” (1988, 4; see also Hintikka 1975, [54.236.245.71] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 12:36 GMT) Representation of the Past and Possible Worlds 31 28; Rescher 1975, 2–3; Adams 1979, 203–5; Bradley and Swartz 1979, 63–64; and Stalnaker 1984, 50–51). Thesecondadjustmentoftheconceptaffectsitsextent.Possibleworlds of logical semantics are “total” or “maximally comprehensive” states of affairs, “maximal cohesive mereological sum(s) of possibilia” (Kripke 1980, 18; Wolterstorff 1980, 131; Yagisawa 1988, 180). Robert M. Adams, following Rudolf Carnap, formulated criteria of “completely determinate ” possible worlds: “(1) For every possible world, w, and every pair of contradictory propositions, one member of the pair is true in w and the other member is false in w. (2) Each possible world, if temporally ordered...