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(1969a) possible worlds split into those that fit our propositional attitudes and those which do not. In this sense our commitment to a possible world is an 'ideological' rather than an ontological matter.
I think that by 'ideological' we should understand something which depends on one's own encyclopedia. If a believes that p, says Hintikka, it means that p is the case in all possible worlds compatible with a's beliefs. The beliefs of a can also be a rather trivial matter concerning a very private course of events, but they form part of a larger system of a's beliefs which is a's encyclopedia. If a believes that Jonah could safely be swallowed by a whale, this happens because a's encyclopedia does not contradict this possibility. Living in the Middle Ages a could say that nothing, in the 'real' world of his experience, had ever contradicted this piece of encyclopedic information. Notice that in the Middle Ages a could have been convinced that he had really seen unicorns: his encyclopedia had so molded his perceptual experience that, in the right hour of the day and with appropriate atmospheric and psychological conditions, he could have easily mistaken a deer for a unicorn.
Therefore a's world of reference is an encyclopedic construct. All this can sound rather Kantian, and I do not deny it. Neither does Hintikka: there is not a Ding an sich that can be described or even identified outside the framework of a conceptual structure (1969a).
Now, what are the effects upon a theory of possible worlds when this epistemological caution is disregarded?
Possible worlds come to be compared to our own as though we lived in a privileged world of unquestionable and already given individuals and properties, accessibility and transworld identity being only a matter of credibility or conceivability on our part. 9 Accessibility is not a matter of psychological conceivability. To say that one world is accessible to another if the individuals living in the former can conceive of the latter presupposes that one is anthropomorphically putting oneself within a given world taken as the 'actual' one and trying to speculate whether what happens in another world fits the requirements of one's own. This attitude is existentially justified; since our human condition (our in-der-Welt-sein) makes us experience our hic et nunc and confers on it a preferential status (at the last frontiers of formalization, frequently the Lebenswelt is still blackmailing modal logic as well).
But this attitude prevents one from considering even one's own world of reference as a cultural construct. Moreover, it makes it difficult to consider, from the same point of view, the mutual accessibility of two possible worlds W1 and W2 equally independent of one's reference world. Fortunately, it has been stated very clearly that 'actual' is an indexical expression and that 'actual world' is every world in which its inhabitants refer to it as the world where they live (see Stalnaker, 1976). But at

 
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