Why (Lewisian) Modal Realism is Absurd

There are of course, the obvious objections - my personal favorite being the 'Humphrey' objection - also known as the 'irrelevant' objection. This is the familiar charge that, even if physically robust counterparts did exist in other spatio-temporally distant worlds, their existence and the properties they possess have no bearings on the existence of objects in this (read: 'our') world - more specifically, that their properties say nothing of the de re modal character of objects in this world; thus we might less affectionately call it the 'Who Cares?' objection.

Consider a further, related objection - what I like to call the 'depravity' objection. First, consider that modal realists, ala Lewis, refuse to grant transworld relational properties - something which, if granted, would at least secure some bind between counterparts; a bind which might plausibly be construed as parasitic in some modally important sense. Secondly, objects in any world have no properties which bespeak any sort of de re modality. There is nothing in the nature of an object, in and of itself, which is modal in character.

This of course stems from the fact that the project of the modal realist is, perhaps contrary to its name, to provide a reductive account of modality. The reduction is supposed to be (qualitatively) economical, where a de re fact about an object just is a quantification over a qualitatively similar object in another world. But that's not all - the modal realist takes himself to have reduced modality tout court. What need is there for modality when we have infinite amounts of worlds, all as concrete as our own with which to quantify over?

But, unfortunately, this is a case of theft over honest toil, and though it perhaps has advantages, it yet cannot accomplish its goal. For the modal realist must have as many worlds to secure all possibility and no more possible worlds as to admit impossibility - that is, he must have modal intuitions which are guiding his theoretical posits. Implicit modality anyone?

It gets worse when we ask: what are the rules for deciding whether or not such a certain world exists? The answer, of course, is that all of its parts (or 'members') must be compossible with one another. But how is this possibility explained? Surely not by reference to counterparts, lest there be no grounding for any world whatsoever. So, here we are again - back to primitive modality. And, unfortunately, to a modality-laden theory which grounds an attempt to explain away modality.