Abstract
Necessitism is the controversial thesis that necessarily everything is necessarily something, namely that everything, everywhere, necessarily exists. What is controversial about necessitism is that, at its core, it claims that things could not have failed to exist, while we have a pre-theoretical intuition that not everything necessarily exists. Contingentism, in accordance with common sense, denies necessitism: it claims that some things could have failed to exist. Timothy Williamson is a necessitist and claims that David Lewis is a necessitist too. The paper argues that, granted the assumptions that lead to interpret the Lewisian as a necessitist, she can preserve contingentist intuitions, by genuinely agreeing with the folk that existence is contingent. This is not just the uncontroversial claim that the Lewisian, as a result of the prevalence of restricted quantification in counterpart theoretic regimentations of natural language, can agree with the folk while disagreeing with them in the metaphysical room. Rather, this is the claim that it is in the metaphysical room that the Lewisian can endorse the intuitions lying behind contingentism.
Highlights
Necessitism is the thesis that necessarily everything is necessarily something, that is, that everything everywhere necessarily exists
I will claim that it is in the metaphysical room that Lewis* agrees with common sense that existence is contingent; namely, it is in that room that Lewis*, in agreement with the folk, rejects the counter-intuitive core of necessitism
What is counter-intuitive about necessitism — which is given by (3’) — would not be expressible at all in CT, since (3’) is not translatable into quantified modal logic (QML)
Summary
Necessitism is the thesis that necessarily everything is necessarily something, that is, that everything everywhere necessarily exists. As we saw, necessitism implies invariably necessary existence, but, according to the Lewisian version of counterpart theoretic interpretation (1968), claims of necessary existence are not invariably true. It is sufficient for the contingent existence of an individual that there should be some possible worlds in which it has no counterparts, and it is an evident feature of genuine modal realism, via recombination (Lewis, 1986a: 87–92), that this should be so. When the folk claim that existence is contingent, her statement does not need to be interpreted as restricted to a domain that is not relevant to metaphysics. By saying that, the folk are stating a thesis that is metaphysically relevant for the Lewisian herself
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