The standard semantics for the modal fragment of natural languages can only be correct if there is more than one possible world. The nature and existence of possible worlds is thus of fundamental importance for such a semantics. The paper develops an account of possible worlds in the spirit of the pleonastic account of abstract entities in general, due to Stephen Schiffer (2003: ch. 2). The mai...

Hale (1999) presents an argument from McFetridge (1990) for his conclusion, and states (1999, p. 32) that there is an obvious objection. His paper aims to supplement McFetridge’s argument to meet that objection. He concludes that this establishes the necessity of necessity. Below are two independent complaints against Hale. The first is directed against McFetridge’s argument. It is independent ...

Pregroups were introduced in (Lambek, 1999), and provide a foundation for a particularly simple syntactic calculus. Buszkowski (2001) showed that free pregroup grammars generate exactly the -free context-free languages. Here we characterize the class of languages generable by all pregroups, which will be shown to be the entire class of recursively enumerable languages. To show this result, we r...