
Contents
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13.1 Introduction 13.1 Introduction
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13.2 Quantum Gravity and Fundamentality 13.2 Quantum Gravity and Fundamentality
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13.3 The Disappearance of Space and Time 13.3 The Disappearance of Space and Time
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13.4 What Unifies a Lewisian World 13.4 What Unifies a Lewisian World
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13.5 Unification Failure 13.5 Unification Failure
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13.6 The Charge of Empirical Incoherence 13.6 The Charge of Empirical Incoherence
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13.7 Emergent Salvation? 13.7 Emergent Salvation?
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13.8 The Relaxation to Natural External Relations 13.8 The Relaxation to Natural External Relations
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13.9 Summary and Outlook 13.9 Summary and Outlook
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13 When the Actual World Is Not Even Possible
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Published:April 2020
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Abstract
Approaches to quantum gravity often involve the disappearance of space and time at the fundamental level. The metaphysical consequences of this disappearance are profound, as is illustrated with David Lewis’s analysis of modality. As Lewis’s possible worlds are unified by the spatiotemporal relations among their parts, the non-fundamentality of spacetime—if borne out—suggests a serious problem for his analysis: his pluriverse, for all its ontological abundance, does not contain our world. Although the mere existence—as opposed to the fundamentality—of spacetime must be recovered from the fundamental structure in order to guarantee the empirical coherence of the non-spatiotemporal fundamental theory, it does not suffice to salvage Lewis’s theory of modality from the charge of rendering our actual world impossible.
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