The metaphysician's free lunch

Abstract

In this paper, I begin to develop a theory called Paradise on the Cheap - in so doing, I intend to provide a rival to David Lewis' modal realism. Paradise on the Cheap grounds possibilia in the features of the actual world; and so, it does not require realist commitments to the existence of non-actual worlds and individuals. I explain modality, conterfactuals, content, and properties in terms of recombinations of actual-world features, second-order mathematical schemata, and the similarity relations which hold between these things and parts of the actual world. Because the ontology of Paradise on the Cheap promotes unity and economy of theory to a greater extent than does model realism's ontology, I argue that we should accept the former theory instead of the latter. Moreover, I address the question of whether inference to the best explanation is an argumentative strategy that is even available to modal realists.