Fernando Furtado

This paper is organized in the following way: the first section puts forward the version of Chisholm’s Modal Paradox that is going to be taken into consideration. The presentation of the paradox is followed by two sections where two invalidating strategies (as I call them) are presented; the second section presents Forbes’ strategy for dealing with the paradox. As part of the second section, it is presented Forbes’ many-valued semantics for modal logic. The third section is a presentation of Salmon’s strategy to solve the paradox. The fourth and last section is reserved for critical comments concerning both approaches. Those comments are to be understood as motivations against each strategy not as definitive refutation of either of them. I finish the paper concluding that Salmon’s strategy seems to be the most conservative invalidating strategy.

This paper is organised as follows: first, I present Salmon’s theory of modality and compare it with the standard interpretation of modality: ‘the nonrelativized S5-friendly interpretation of metaphysical modality’. Second, I explain Murray and Wilson’s ‘two-dimensional S5-friendly interpretation of relativized metaphysical modality’. In the third and last part, I put forward a few arguments against Murray and Wilson’s attempt to provide an essentialist S5-friendly theory for modality. In general, this paper argues that if one wants to hold an essentialist theory for relativized modality, then his best option in the market right now is to stick with Salmon’s proposal, which better represents a genuine essentialist interpretation of relativized metaphysical modality.