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usually taken as basically similar to the world of the reader's experience or, better, of the reader's encyclopedia). Inferential walks concern, on the other hand, individuals and properties belonging to different possible worlds imagined by the reader as possible outcomes of the fabula. |
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Our problem is now the following: Is it possible to use the concept of possible worlds in the analysis of the pragmatic process of actualization of narrative structures without assuming it in a merely metaphorical way? |
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The notion of possible worlds has been elaborated to avoid a whole series of problems connected with intensionality so as to solve them within an extensional framework. To do so, possible-worlds semantics should take into account neither concrete differences in meaning between two expressions nor the code for interpreting a given language: "The semantic theory treats the spaces of entities and possible worlds as bare, undifferentiated sets having no structure whatever, and though the space of moments of time is at least an ordered set, it is common and convenient to impose very few requirements on the ordering relations" (Thomason, 1974:50). |
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It must be clear that our concern is rather different: we are interested in concrete occurrences of semantic disclosures and of inferential walks. From the point of view of a text semiotics, a possible world is not a bare but an overfurnished set. In other words, we shall speak not of abstract types of possible worlds that do not contain a list of individuals (Hintikka, 1973:chap. 1), but, on the contrary, of 'pregnant' worlds of which one must know all the acting individuals and their properties. |
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This assumption is open to a double order of strictures, both expressed by Volli (1978): |
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(i) The notion of possible worlds is used in many philosophical contexts, sometimes as a mere figure of speech coming from science-fiction novels, sometimes in an extremely metaphysical sense, sometimes as a mere formal calculus dealing with intensional entities as if they were collections of extensional entities, plus an appealing metaphor. Therefore, as a notion in modal logic, it is doubtful; as a philosophical notion it is outdated; and, as a category applicable to natural languages and semiotic systems, it falls under the stricture (ii). Also, from a logical point of view, inasmuch as it depends on the notions of necessity and possibility, it is ruled by a mere petitio principii. To say that a proposition p is necessary in a given world if it is true in all possible worlds accessible to it does not say anything, since it is frequently said that two or more worlds are mutually accessible (or alternative compossible) when the same necessary propositions hold in all of them. To say that a proposition p is possible in a given world, when p holds in at least one among its |
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