I’ll put this paper on the papers blog tomorrow, but I think it deserved a special announcement of its own.

bq. “Michael Fara”:http://instruct1.cit.cornell.edu/research/fara/research.html and Timothy Williamson, “Counterparts and Actuality”:http://instruct1.cit.cornell.edu/research/fara/counterparts.pdf.

bq. The language of quantified modal logic needs an “actuality” operator to represent many modal claims of natural language. But David Lewis’s counterpart theory can be neither extended nor revised to accommodate such an operator. Accordingly counterpart theory should be rejected as a way of understanding modality.

Also the observant blog readers might notice that my blog includes, for the first time, a picture of me. This used to be the done thing to do on blogs, but it seems to be going out of fashion. As always, I’m two years behind the curve. (Did I mention how much I liked the new “Modest Mouse”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B0001M7P78/ref=nosim/caoineorg-20 album?) The picture is by Andy Egan, and it was taken in Canberra in June 2003. You can just make out the poster in the background for Jerry Fodor’s Jack Smart lecture, which was one of the things I went to Canberra to see.