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ACTUALISM AS A FORM OF
LIBERAL NATURALISM
Paul Redding

1 What’s in a name?
The liberal naturalist, we are told, seeks an inclusive philosophical position beyond scientific
naturalism, and in this respect, the adjective “liberal” seems particularly apt. Thus, among the
various meanings for the term “liberal” to be found in the Oxford English Dictionary are: “di-
rected to a general intellectual enlargement and refinement”, “not narrowly restricted to the
refinements of technical or professional training” and “free from narrow prejudice; open-
minded, candid” (Simpson and Weiner 2004, vol. 8, 881–882).
The other concept central to the dictionary meaning of “liberal” is that of freedom, as is found
in the original sense of “those ‘arts’ or ‘sciences’ that were ‘worthy of a free man’; opposed to
servile or mechanical” (Ibid.). Now, abstracting away from the class- and gender-ridden idea of
a liberal culture deemed the appropriate domain of the leisured gentleman, I take it that such a
link to freedom also recommends the adjective “liberal” to the liberal naturalist as well. This is
because the ontology favored by the rival scientific naturalist can be seen as incapable of finding
a place for us human beings in terms resembling those in which we otherwise understand
ourselves, for example, as beings capable of something like free agency or self-determination.
Now traditionally, idealism has been thought to offer some kind of a counter to scientific
naturalism along these lines, but I suspect that the liberal naturalist might assume that the idealist
is committed to the type of supernaturalism to which she is equally opposed. Thus, liberal
naturalism is, we are told, “a philosophical outlook lying between scientific naturalism and su-
pernaturalism” (De Caro and Macarthur, 2015). The liberal naturalist wants to account for
intentional human beings without reference to “the supernatural, whether in the form of
entities (such as God, spirits, entelechies, or Cartesian minds), events (such as miracles or
magic), or epistemic faculties (such as mystical insight or spiritual intuition)” (De Caro and
Macarthur 2010, 3). I don’t believe that idealism – at least the type of idealism espoused by
Hegel – was in fact a supernaturalist doctrine, but I won’t be arguing for that thesis here. The
account of actualism I will present here derives from quite different sources, drawing on work
within recent metaphysical debates generated from developments in modal logic.1
This form of actualism, I will suggest, neatly provides for those “liberal” features of nat-
uralism that the liberal naturalist desires – basically, a place for mind in the otherwise natural
world – but it does so while circumventing the difficult questions that arise when, starting from

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 Paul Redding

the natural world, one attempts to find in it a place for mind. The advantage of thinking of the
“actual world” as the fundamental domain of philosophical enquiry, I’ll suggest, is that it ac-
commodates mind from the outset. Moreover, as the actualist’s position in modal metaphysics is
self-consciously shaped by a need to avoid supernaturalistic assumptions that the actualist claims
to find in rival views, it is both self-conscious and thorough-going in its anti-supernaturalism.
Nevertheless, the distinction between the “actual” and the “real” is far from clear and easily
misunderstood, and so is in need of some initial clarification.

2 The real and the actual

Realists sometimes respond in a somewhat exasperated manner on being asked what exactly
they mean by “reality”. “Reality is…”, they may say, with some associated hand-waving –
“what’s…out there!”. However, in relation to this it is instructive to be reminded that the last
half century has witnessed considerable debate over the viability of this assumption. David
Lewis had famously used the word “reality” in such a way that there was supposed to be more to
reality than what was “out there”, at least if that phrase is meant to capture our world, the world
that “consists of us and all our surroundings, however remote in time and space” (Lewis 1986,
2). Lewis thought of that latter realm as the actual world, and his reality included the actual as
well as many other alternate possible worlds.
Lewis’s extremely counterintuitive metaphysical claims about the reality of alternate possible
worlds arose when the type of modal logic introduced by C.I. Lewis early in the twentieth
century had received been transformed in the late 1950s and early 1960s when technical in-
novations by Saul Kripke and others allowed the development of so-called “possible-world
semantics”. Kripke had been able to effectively extend existing “model theory” to C.I. Lewis’s
propositional modal logic by offering completeness proofs for Lewis’s various modal systems. The
basic intuition behind Kripke’s formalisation was to qualify the way that the quantifiers of
classical logic worked in modal contexts. In short, the quantifiers of modal sentences were
thought to quantify not over the range of objects specified in the structures of standard model-
theoretic semantics – that is, objects assumed to exist in the actual world – but over a plurality of
“possible worlds”. In this way, possible-world semantics could treat necessary truths in a
Leibnizian manner as truths holding in all possible worlds, and possible truths as ones holding in
some possible worlds, and, not necessarily ours. And while this was seen by many as surely a good
thing from the point of view of theories of logic and language, it raised the type of metaphysical
questions that analytic philosophers had thought they had put behind them when taking the
analytic turn, such as needing to ask about the “reality” of things that didn’t exist but might have.
In his 1959 paper, Kripke had written that “it is not necessary for our present purposes to
analyze the concept of a ‘possible world’ any further” (Kripke 1959, 2), but others clearly felt
the need to scratch this itch. Lewis’s theory of the reality of merely possible worlds was one such
response (e.g. Lewis 1986).
Lewis’s “possibilism”, the view of reality as made up of many possible worlds,2 was
countered by advocates of various versions of “actualism”, including the form of actualism I
want to discuss here – that found in the work of Robert Stalnaker.3 In contrast to Lewis, an
actualist is, like Stalnaker, more likely to simply identify the real with the actual, and so identify
the real with what is “out there”, apparently in conformity with the realist’s intuition.
However, we should pause to consider the full ramifications of this. Thinking of the actual
world as what is “out there” appears to offer support to Lewis’s “indexical” treatment of the
actual, which probably runs contrary to what the realist had intended. Designated in this
gesturing way, actuality is being characterised subjectively in the way that a particular time, say,

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may be subjectively characterised by being referred to as “now”, or as a time that gains its
identity from the now, as with “yesterday” or “tomorrow” for example. This characterisation is
subjective in the sense that “now” is always somebody’s now. But the actualist, or “modal
actualist”, wants, like Lewis, to treat modal talk as meaningful, and so treat alternate possibilities
as in some sense real.4 And so, foregoing the idea of other possible worlds, the actualist must find a
place “within” the actual world for nonactual possibilities, replacing talk of “possible worlds”
with that of “possible alternate states of the world”. This, however, may put pressure on any
easy identification of the real with what is “out there”. The handwaving gesture of the realist
may have been made in the spirit of a “bricks and mortar” style realism, a little like Samuel
Johnson’s famous “refutation” of Berkeley’s immaterialism. But for the actualist, “out there”
would now seem not only to be related to some subjective point of view, it now also has to
“contain” nonexisting alternate states of things. Being a realist about nonactual possibilities is no
simple task. Aristotle had attempted to capture the idea of a potential (dynamis) but from the
point of view that made the actual (energia) primary. This seemed, however, to create an in-
ternal distinction within the actual between something not-yet-actual (a potential) and its ac-
tuality.5 The messiness of modal notions such as this had led a generation of analytic
philosophers to deny the meaningfulness of modal talk, but the development of possible-world
semantics had put this issue back on the agenda. Besides this, intuitions about realisable but
nonactual possibilities seem part of everyday consciousness, and it is hard to think of ourselves as
agents without some distinction like this one.
Both of these features of the position that we see shaping up as an actualist alternative to
Lewisian possibilism – the idea of the indexicality of the actual, and the need to accommodate
alternatives to the actual states to be found in the actual world – push this alternative toward
embracing a feature that has been traditionally seen as an aspect of idealism. This is the idea that
there is mind in the world. Lewis’s idea that the actual world “consists of us and all our sur-
roundings” effectively defines actuality as containing us, and so only the relatively un-
contentious further claim that we have minds is needed to construe actuality as thereby
containing minds. Idealism is usually associated with a stronger claim – that the world necessarily
contains us minded creatures and that our existence is the outcome of some divine plan. But the
actualist as described here has no need to go down that path. There is a sense in which minds
are necessarily in the actual world, but this is the trivial sense deriving from the decision to
characterise the actual indexically like Lewis. Being realists about alternate possible states of the
world, we can postulate states in which minded creatures had not evolved, our existence as
minded creatures being seen as therefore contingent. But just as a world without minded
creatures would be a world without “nows” or “tomorrows”, a world without minds of any
kind in it would lack those features that make it this world, the world alluded to by our would-
be realist. In this sense, actualism might be seen as a metaphysically inexpensive version of
idealism, achieving what the liberal naturalist wants from nature without some of the sur-
rounding problems. Nature is easily conceivable without minds, and so starting with nature one
has to find a place in it for minds. Start with the actual world, however, and minds are already in
it. We get them for free.
There is another dimension to this view of actualism with minds-built-into-it-from-the-start
that offers a way beyond a problem expressed in relation to the “bricks and mortar” realist’s
conception of how what’s “out there” might accommodate nonactual possibilities. Simply, if
what is “out there” includes other persons conceived as “intentional” beings, then the existence
of alternate possibilities to the actual becomes less obscure. It is part of our general conception
of what it is to have a mind that minds confer rationality and freedom on their bearers, and the
idea of freedom comes along with the idea of the capacity of an agent to in some way bring

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about states of the world that would not have otherwise come about by themselves. That is, we
can conceive of these alternatives to the actual as existing in the intentional states of beings
capable of coming up with plans and acting in ways to help realise them. In this sense, the
existence of minds in the world and the existence of unrealised possibilities or potentialities go
together. This now brings into focus a further but related sense in which the existence of other
minds in the actual world brings with it the existence of alternate possibilities for this world.
Other individuals have beliefs about how the world is that can differ from one’s own, and we
can use the idea of “possible worlds” to capture the content and the logic of those belief states.

Just as necessity is truth in all possible worlds, so knowledge is truth in all epistemically
possible worlds. The assumption is that to have knowledge is to have a capacity to
locate the actual world in logical space, to exclude certain possibilities from the
candidates for actuality (Stalnaker 2019, 12). This was the basic drift of the approach to
the modal logics of knowledge and belief that was started by Jaakko Hintikka in the
early days of post-Kripkean modal logic (Hintikka 1962).

Hintikka had taken this application to the intentional states of others as the natural way to
understand modal logic, rejecting the primacy given to “aletheic” modal readings with their
problem-ridden metaphysical dimensions (Hintikka, 2006, 20–23). Starting from C.I. Lewis’s
propositional approach to modal logic, Hintikka attributed propositional contents to the belief
states of others by treating the attribution of those states in a way that others treated necessity
and possibility as propositional operators. Later, this possible-worlds approach to intentional
states would be given a twist by Lewis, and a further twist by Stalnaker to compensate for the
fact that Hintikka’s approach “did not give explicit attention to the interaction of different
knowers” (Stalnaker 2019, 14).

3 The indexicality of the actual world and locating minds from within it
Actualists are likely to conceive of the relation of modal to nonmodal logics differently to the way
that this has come to be conceived from the dominant point of view. I have suggested that any
view of the world indexed to certain cognisers will be that of a world which must, in some sense,
be understood as containing those cognisers, but this might be met with an opposing view with a
long and prestigious pedigree. For example, an opponent might appeal to the type of view ex-
pressed by Wittgenstein in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (Wittgenstein 1981), in which the
world seems indexed to a thinker but in a way that avoids the conception of containing that thinker:

5.631 The thinking, presenting subject; there is no such thing.

If I wrote a book “The world as I found it”, I should also have therein to
report on my body and say which members obey my will and which do not,
etc. This then would be a method of isolating the subject or rather of
showing that in an important sense there is no subject: that is to say, of it
alone in this book mention could not be made.
5.632 The subject does not belong to the world but it is a limit of the world.

This idea that “the subject” is not a thing and so does not belong to the world presupposes a
view of logic and the content of judgments that, I will be arguing, the actualist opposes. This
idea of a Tractarian subject that “shrinks to an extensionless point” and that does not belong to
the world but is rather “co-ordinated with it” (Ibid., 5.64) has a long philosophical pedigree

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that includes Kant’s “transcendental subject of apperception”, an “I think” that while able to
accompany all representations does not belong to the world as represented (Kant, 1998, B131). But
the reason that the Tractarian or transcendental subject here does not belong to its world seems
to be a product of how “the world” to which it is coordinated is conceived. In such views, the
world is conceived as a centerless structure that is isomorphic with a set of consistent centerless
propositions, none of which contain indexicals that would tie subjects in determinate ways to
locations in that world. In the Tractarian world there could be no “heres” or “nows” that the
subject in question would grasp as its own, because the presence of indexicals would upset the
needed pattern of consistency given the fact that the truth or falsity of those indexical judgments
vary with time.6 The actualist thinks of indexicality as ineliminable from any subject’s set of
beliefs, however, and so the view of any particular subject’s set of beliefs as captured by a set of
consistent propositions with absolute, timeless truth values must be given up.
The idea of the “ineliminability of the indexical”, call it the “indexicality thesis”, has ap-
peared in various forms in analytic philosophy,7 but I want to focus here on the types of reasons
why an actualist might want to affirm this position. In an example of an indexical judgment from
Perry’s classic paper, an academic in her office intends to go to a meeting that is to start at noon,
and at noon, she leaves the office to do as she had intended. Among the various beliefs needed
to act in this way is the indexical belief she had at noon that “it’s now noon” (Perry 1979, 4).
Beliefs such as this have come to be known as the paradigms of “self-locating” beliefs because
they locate the agent in the world as they conceive it to be. As Stalnaker puts it, “the agent’s
particular location in the world provides the anchor that determines the way all of her thoughts
get their content” (Stalnaker 2019, 73). An agent can think about nonactual possible situations,
but to do so must draw upon semantic resources provided by their actual world. The basic
strategy at work here is to avoid attributing to agents any “magical” conceptions of reference, of
the sort that Hilary Putnam had referred to as requiring “metaphysical glue” to establish
connections between an agent’s thoughts and what they are about (Putnam 1980).
To incorporate indexical beliefs into a system like Hintikka’s epistemic logic David Lewis
had treated the contents of self-locating beliefs in terms of possible worlds which themselves had
a “center” (Lewis 1979), but a problem with Lewis’s approach, Stalnaker thinks, is that it
obscures the distinction between a simple difference of perspective between individual intentional
agents on the one hand and real disagreement between them on the other (Stalnaker 2008,
49–51). In our attempts to understand the world we draw upon the achievements of others and
we need to be able to calibrate our beliefs with those of different and differently located agents.
If I believe that climate change is real, and Tony tells me that it is a hoax, I don’t want to
construe Tony’s beliefs as merely about the world as Tony believes it to be or how it “looks”
from his point of view. His beliefs are also about my world. Reflecting on the disagreement I
will need to locate Tony in my world, and think about how his “location” in the world – the
newspapers he reads, perhaps – might bear on the views he has about the world.
Stalnaker sums up the situation in this way:

the lesson we should learn from the phenomenon of self-locating belief is that we
cannot give an adequate representation of a state of belief without connecting the
world as the subject takes it to be with the subject who has the beliefs…When we
represent the way this individual locates himself in the world as he takes it to be, we
need to include the information about who it is who is locating himself there, and we
need to link the world as the believer takes it to be to the world in which the believer
takes the world to be that way (Stalnaker 2008, 53).

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The problem with Lewis’s way of picturing possible worlds was that according to it

belief about what possible world you are in is like belief about what country you are
in, while beliefs about where in the world you are is like a more specific belief about
where, in the country you are (what village, street corner, or mountain top).

But Stalnaker counters this with the idea that

ordinary belief about where you are in the world is always also belief about what
possible world you are in (what possible state of the world is actual). If I am not sure,
as I drive along the highway toward New York, whether I am still in Massachusetts,
then I am not sure whether I am in a possible world in which this stretch of highway is
located in Massachusetts (Stalnaker 2008, 51).

This significance of this is that it provides a way of translating between self-locating and
ordinary beliefs for single, isolated beliefs. Consider the case where Stalnaker asks himself
while driving, “Is this stretch of highway in Massachusetts?” This question could be answered
by a subject-locating belief about that particular stretch of highway picked out by the de-
monstrative. But the question can be put in a type of inverted way to ask not about this
stretch of highway (a de-re question, as it were) but about the truth or falsity of the belief involved
(a de-dicto question): “Is the belief that this stretch of highway is in Massachusetts, true?”.
Unlike the de-re question, the de-dicto one is not being made exclusively from the per-
spective of the driver. Anyone could ask a similar question such as “Is the stretch of highway
that Prof. Stalnaker is now driving along in Massachusetts?” – that is, anyone, including
Stalnaker himself.
Any normal speaker is capable of doing this – it is just a variant on the type of translation we
use when, instead of saying “Yesterday I went to the library”, one says that one went to the
library on a certain date. Stalnaker’s “actualist” point, however, is that to make such generalised
“decontextualised” assertions capable of being understood across contexts, a speaker must
employ semantic resources found in the actual world, because “all of an agent’s representations
get their content from that agent’s relation to the things those representations are about”
(Stalnaker 2019, 4) – things to which they can be related in the actual world.
For the actualist, the picture of human subjectivity portrayed in a Tractarian or transcendental
way cannot give an account of how our intentional states can be directed to the world. It is the
assumption that they are that relies on Putnam’s “metaphysical glue”. We must grasp that it is
only because we are, qua minded beings, located in the world in particular places that we can
have intentionally directed thoughts and beliefs, thoughts and beliefs that are in the first instance
from that particular point of view. For this reason, we must rely in the existence of other
differently located intentional beings who express thoughts and beliefs indexed to those dif-
ferent locations. And so,

clarifying a conception of this kind will involve considering different perspectives on

the world, and relations between those perspectives. In a sense, we are looking at
ourselves from the outside, as agents whose interactions with nature and with other
agents are part of an objective world to be described and explained. But we also
recognize that we aren’t really outside: Our third-person view of ourselves is de-
veloped and refined within the world, from perspectives within it (Stalnaker 2019, 3).

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4 Redefining metaphysics with an actualist’s account of modality

I’ve been sketching in some of the features of the modal landscape of the contemporary “ac-
tualist”, but as mentioned at the outset, my aim is to attempt to use the basic features of the
actualist position developed within modal metaphysics to argue for a broader redefinition of the
very project of metaphysics itself, one that is in the spirit of “liberal naturalism”.
“Actualism” is often discussed as a metaphysical theory in contemporary analytic meta-
physics, in which it is set in opposition to its antagonist, “possibilism”, in much the same way
that traditionally opposed metaphysical theories such as realism and nominalism, materialism
and idealism and so forth, are opposed. A recent volume devoted to analytic metaphysics notes
how, having gone out of fashion during much of the first half of the twentieth century within
analytic circles, metaphysics then came back into fashion with the sorts of modal issues discussed
here playing a significant part in this revival (Loux and Zimmerman 2003). The general im-
pression, however, is that of a restitution of metaphysics in the traditional sense of aiming at
some comprehensive account of the “ontological structures” or “ultimate features” of reality.
Such talk, however, strongly conveys the idea of a subject matter, “reality”, as “what’s there
anyway” – a reality as it exists independently of any mind that might attempt to come to terms
with it. But thinking of metaphysics in this way, while it might make sense from the possibilist
side of the debate, does not, I’ve suggested, make sense from the actualist side. The idea of the
restitution of metaphysics via clashes of metaphysical theories fails to take into account how
such debates might contribute to the redefinition of metaphysics itself.
The version of modal actualism that I have sketched here fits poorly into a position within
the metaphysical debate as traditionally understood: it is probably better understood as a “meta-
metaphysical” stance that foregoes the intelligibility of the traditional project of metaphysics as
out of step with the finitistic, antisupernatural view that has become predominant within
“enlightened” and generally liberal thought in the modern West. In this sense, it is a form of
skepticism, but it still sees a significant place for the sort of work typically done in the name of
metaphysics. On an individual level this type of winding back of the ambitions of metaphysics is
neatly expressed by Stalnaker when he writes that while originally motivated to “get to the
bottom of things”, and later realising that “the bottom was further down than I thought”, he
has finally come to the view that “there is no bottom: the best we can do in philosophy is to
chip away at bits and pieces of the problems” (Stalnaker 2019, 1). This is an attitude he
identifies as broadly naturalistic and Humean, and as at one with the idea that

we can’t separate the task of developing and justifying rules for finding out about the
world from the substantive task of developing a view about what the world is like. We
approach both tasks from within, criticizing and refining the methods and beliefs that
we find ourselves with (Ibid., 3).

If naturalism in its liberal form is motivated by the recognition that we belong to the world, then
the other side of this recognition is that the world should be regarded from the start, as containing
the type of beings that we are.

Notes
1 Nevertheless, I have been drawn to such issues in modal metaphysics via relations, both historical and
substantive, to aspects of Hegel’s idealism. See especially the work of John N. Findlay in relation to the
actualism of Prior (1967) on the one hand and nontraditional readings of Hegel on the other
(Redding 2017).

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2 Here I will use the phrase “possibilism” to refer to Lewis’ claim of the existence of possible worlds of
which ours is just one. As has often been pointed out, the term “modal realism” that Lewis used of his
own philosophy is misleading, as Lewis thought of modal issues as being reductively explained in terms
of the plurality of possible amodal worlds.
3 That is not to say that all such “actualisms” are without supernaturalistic assumptions, that of Alvin
Plantinga (Plantinga 2003) being a case in point.
4 Kit Fine defines modal actualism as the conjunction of “modalism”, taking modality seriously, and
“actualism”, taking actuality seriously, in this way (Fine 2005, 2). Fine treats Arthur Prior effectively as
the prototype of the modal actualist (Ibid., 133).
5 On some of the internal dilemmas of Aristotle’s treatment of the potential–actual distinction, see
Bechler (1995).
6 That is, while the set of propositions containing some indexical ones [p1, p2…pn] might be consistent at
t1, it might be inconsistent at t2.
7 The classic statement is Perry (1979), but see also Lewis (1979).

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