Modalism

The philosophy of modality divides into three main areas: semantics, metaphysics, and epistemology. Modalism is a realist, non-reductivist thesis about modal discourse. Having argued for primitive modality, modalism has been implemented to illuminate propositions, sets, facts, individual essences, substances, properties, events, to clarify and to justify logical pluralism, and to provide an account of the logical constants. Typically, reductive theories are prompted by epistemological, ontological, or ideological considerations. A separable metaphysical motivation is the belief that reality is categorical. The primary contrast with reductive theories of modality is modalism, according to which modality is a primitive, irreducible feature of reality. Modalism has been cast by Fine and Forbes as a thesis about the language of possibility.