Abstract
The purpose of the paper is to rethink the role of actuality in the branching model of possibilities. We investigate the idea that the model should be enriched with an additional factor—the so-called Thin Red Line—which is supposed to represent the single possible course of events that gets actualized in time. We believe that this idea was often misconceived which prompted some unfortunate reactions. On the one hand, it suggested problematic semantic models of future tense and and on the other, it provoked questionable lines of criticism. We reassess the debate and point to potential pitfalls, focusing on the semantic dimension of the Thin Red Line theory. Our agenda transcends the semantics, however. We conclude that semantic considerations do not threaten the Thin Red Line theory and that the proper debate should be carried in the domain of metaphysics.
Highlights
Why do we need the Thin Red Line?The reasons supporting the TRL are twofold—metaphysical and semantic. As we shall see, these two domains are closely connected and the theoretical choices made in one domain usually affect the decisions made in another
The paper is structured as follows: In the first section, we motivate introduction of the Thin Red Line (TRL) and explain how it may be applied for semantic purposes
When TRL is stated in its proper setting of modal actualism, the postsemantic problem has no teeth and the simple theory introduced in the second section turns out to be free of both semantic and postsemantic difficulties
Summary
The reasons supporting the TRL are twofold—metaphysical and semantic. As we shall see, these two domains are closely connected and the theoretical choices made in one domain usually affect the decisions made in another. The role of postsemantics is to systematically relate the everyday notion of truth of a sentence used at a context (which we symbolically encode as ||−) to a more technical notion of Ockhamist truth of a sentence at a semantic index (which we symbolize by | ) This brings us to the second, more technical source of motivation for the TRL. Thanks to the actualistic insight encoded by TRL, we can respond to the initialization failure and return to the “flat” postsemantics advocated by David Kaplan and evaluate an expression used at a context at the (present) moment and the (actual) history of the context This idea might seem as the most natural way to tackle the initialization failure, it has been treated with considerable distrust. We do not believe that future looks so dim for the TRL, but let us first briefly recapitulate those worries
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