A possible world is a complete and consistent way the world is or could have been. Possible worlds are widely used as a formal device in logic, philosophy, and linguistics in order to provide a semantics for intensional and modal logic. Their metaphysical status has been a subject of controversy in philosophy, with modal realists such as David Lewis arguing that there are literally existing alternate realities, and others such as Robert Stalnaker arguing that alternate realities do not exist.
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Actual world in the context of State of affairs (philosophy)
In philosophy, a state of affairs (German: Sachverhalt), also known as a situation, is a way the actual world must be in order to make some given proposition about the actual world true; in other words, a state of affairs is a truth-maker, whereas a proposition is a truth-bearer. Whereas states of affairs either obtain or fail-to-obtain, propositions are either true or false. Some philosophers understand the term "states of affairs" in a more restricted sense as a synonym for "fact". In this sense, there are no states of affairs that do not obtain.
The early Ludwig Wittgenstein and David Malet Armstrong are well known for their defence of a factualism, a position according to which the world is a world of facts and not a world of things.
Actual world in the context of Epistemic possibility
In philosophy and modal logic, epistemic possibility relates a statement under consideration to the current state of our knowledge about the actual world: a statement is said to be:
- epistemically possible if it may be true, for all we know
- epistemically necessary if it is certain (or must be the case), given what we know
- epistemically impossible if it cannot be true, given what we know
Epistemic possibility is often contrasted with subjunctive possibility (or alethic possibility), and although epistemic and subjunctive possibilities are often expressed using the same modal terms (such as possibly, could be, must be) or similar modal terms that are sometimes confused (such as may be and might be), statements that are qualified in terms of epistemic possibility and statements that are qualified in terms of subjunctive possibility have importantly different meanings.