New Literary History

The contemporary researcher is engaged in a losing struggle with the information explosion. The struggle is especially desper-ate in interdisciplinary research, where no one can master all the published literature in all the special fields. As interdisciplinary investigations become more and more necessary, they become more and more 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 sciences a “literary” 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 “territorial 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 transcending 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. [End Page 785] Without referring to the classical German philosopher, Kripke called upon the concept of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. ² His ignoring of Leibniz was partly justified: he was not formulating a grand argument for “theodicy,” but an axiomatic foundation for modal logic. The Leibnizian roots of possible-worlds semantics have subsequently been revealed, ³ and through the labors of a host of logicians—Jaakko Hintikka, Dana Scott, Georg H. von Wright, David Lewis, David Kaplan, Robert Stalnaker, M. J. Cresswell, and others—not only modal logic, but the whole system of logic has been reformulated on the assumption that “our actual world is surrounded by an infinity of other possible worlds.” ⁴ The universe of discourse is not restricted to the actual world, but spreads over uncountable possible, nonactualized worlds. As Thomas S. Kuhn explains, “a possible world is . . . a way our world might have been. . . . Thus, in our world the earth has only a single natural satellite (the moon), but there are other possible worlds, almost the same as ours, except that the earth has two or more satellites or has none at all. . . . There are also possible worlds less like ours: some in which there is no earth, others in which there are no planets, and still others in which not even the laws of nature are the same.” ⁵

In logical semantics the possible-worlds model does not require ontological commitment. Pointing specifically to Hintikka’s and Kripke’s proposals, a Russian logician emphasized that they should be taken “simply as mathematical models of the corresponding logical calculi, without any philosophical interpretation.” ⁶ Outside formal logic, however, the notion cannot preserve ontological innocence. As Robert M. Adams has recognized, it follows the fundamental split in ontology, becoming either actualism or possibilism. For possibilism, the actual world “does not have a different status” within the set of possible worlds, while for actualism the actual world is “a standpoint outside the system of possible worlds from which judgments of actuality which are not world-relative may be made.” ⁷ The actualist position is inscribed in Kripke’s original model structure where set G (the actual world) is singled out from the set of sets K (all possible worlds), and is accepted by Plantinga, Rescher...