Thursday, August 27, 2009

A Possible Aid to Cosmological Arguments via Possible World Semantics

So, I'm not extremely well-versed in the gritty details of cosmological arguments or possible-worlds semantics, but I had a thought which might be a good one in-embryo concerning these issues.

The thought is this: If every possible world is a complete discription of how reality might be, then wouldn't it be impossible for any world to contain an infinite set of moments? The reason is this: Every moment would correspond to a proposition describing a state of affairs, i.e., a fact. A possible world which contained an infinite number of moments would have the set ("~" being infinity): {~...t', t*, t^...~}. That is, it would contain a set of infinite facts, and thus could never be a complete description of how reality might be. The argument would go like this:

P1. Every possible world is a complete description of reality.
P2. For a description to be complete, it cannot contain a set of facts with infinite members.
C3. Therefore, there is no possible world which contains a set of facts with infinite members.

This at least has intuitive appeal, and avoids objections to the standard argument that the infinite cannot be traversed, or that it leads to mathematical absurdities. Of course the argument needs a lot of sprucing up and explanation, but it may have something to it.

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