Possible Worlds of Fiction and History

Abstract

difficult. An easy way out of this difficulty is to interpret the problems of other disciplines in terms of one's own. This practice is typical of quite a few humanists and theorists of literature. While claiming to cultivate interdisciplinarity, they give philosophy, history, and even natural sci ences a treatment; their complex and diverse problems are reduced to concepts current in contemporary literary writing, such as subject, discourse, narrative, metaphor, semantic indeterminacy, and ambiguity. The universal literariness of knowledge acquisition and representation is then hailed as an interdisciplinary confirmation of epistemological relativism and indeterminism, to which contemporary literati subscribe. Interdisciplinarity dominated by the principles of literary writing, while posing as a definitive divorce from positivism, presupposes, in fact, the positivistic principle, that is, the division of cognitive activities into a hierarchy of specialized disciplines. Yet contemporary interdisciplinarity is part and parcel of new cognitive strategies tran scending the traditional territorial division. While specialized fields continue their empirical research, most advances in theory are achieved in transdisciplinary frameworks, in hyphenated sciences (such as psycholinguistics or biochemistry) and in covering macrosciences (semiotics, cybernetics, ecological science). Interdisciplinarity is now primarily the positing and testing of higher-order theoretical and conceptual systems that illuminate problems cutting across traditional disciplines. One of such irradiating centers is the conceptual system of possible worlds. 1. Possible worlds. The reemergence of the concept of possible worlds from a long-lasting dormancy can be dated quite exactly: to the classic paper of Saul A. Kripke.1 Kripke proposed a model structure for modal logic and interpreted it semantically in terms of possible worlds.