I confess that I'm confused. Why does the "proliferation" of modal logics imply that philosophers do not strive for reductionism? Why think that having several modal logics is a bad thing? These logics were developed originally as purely formal syntactic systems with different sets of axioms. In a sense, decrying the proliferation of modal logics is akin to decrying the proliferation of non-Euclidean geometries. There were modal logics long before philosophers ever spoke of possible worlds, which, unless you're one of the few convinced by David Lewis, philosophers take simply to be a useful heuristic when speaking of possibility and necessity. How can one talk about a purely causal model with some... (read more)
I confess that I'm confused. Why does the "proliferation" of modal logics imply that philosophers do not strive for reductionism? Why think that having several modal logics is a bad thing? These logics were developed originally as purely formal syntactic systems with different sets of axioms. In a sense, decrying the proliferation of modal logics is akin to decrying the proliferation of non-Euclidean geometries. There were modal logics long before philosophers ever spoke of possible worlds, which, unless you're one of the few convinced by David Lewis, philosophers take simply to be a useful heuristic when speaking of possibility and necessity. How can one talk about a purely causal model with some... (read more)