In the first half of section 4, Read has argued that modal realism fails.
However, there’s another way of saving the possible world approach to modality from circularity.
It’s David Armstrong’s Combinatorialism.
Read points out that combinatorialism presupposes atomic, i.e. logically independent proposition s, and turns to argue against them.
Certainly, and Read doesn’t even explicate this first step, allegedly atomic propositions do not contain any logical constants but are of the form R^n a_1, … a_n, that is, represent facts which consist of some n-placed relation and n particulars.
The problem is, however, that every property (and relation) can be determined further. Read’s example is red and its different shades crimson and scarlet.
Since nothing can be both crimson and scarlet (all over), the propositions `crimson(a)’ and `scarlet(a)’ aren’t independent, hence not atomic.
Further, the incompatibility of different ways of specification cannot be resolved by analysis but repeats at any `lower’ level
This must be so, since otherwise the analysis would have failed since it does not capture the essential differences, Read points out [p. 338].
Read considers how Armstrong claims to solve this problem. I’m sorry to say that I don’t quite get Armstrong’s solution, at least not from Read’s exposition. Perhaps I should have a look into the book (A Combinatorial Theory of Possibility). Anyway, Read dismisses it [p. 340], and so for the time being I shall turn to his diagnosis of why the combinatorialist variant of the possible-world approach to modality has failed as well.
As it was to be expected from the preceding sections, Read thinks that combinatorialism contradicts to the unity of fact. States of affairs cannot be taken apart, since it is only them obtaining which ensures their unity. At this point I cannot put it more concisely than Read himself:
`[...] once one has taken a fact apart, there is no way to put it back together again’ [p. 340].
Therefore, combinatorialism is flawed at its basis, or so Read argues.
The unity of fact excludes atoms of which non-actual states of affairs can be construed by recombination: `What combinations there are, are all there are’ [ibid.].
Now, in the very last paragraph of this section, Read takes a surprising move: He identifies Wittgenstein’s bipolarity account of truth and falsity as deficient. Two poles do not suffice to account for all the different facts which render a proposition true or false. The one proposition that a is crimson is made false by the fact that a is scarlet as well as by a’s being vermilion, ultramarine, cyan or of some other (shade of a) colour.
I’m curious now what Read is going to make out of this in his conclusion…
Posted by jonne