Abstract
The metaphor of a branching tree of future possibilities has a number of important philosophical and logical uses. In this paper we trace this metaphor through some of its uses and argue that the metaphor works the same way in physics as in philosophy. We then give an overview of formal systems for branching possibilities, viz., branching time and (briefly) branching space-times. In a next step we describe a number of different notions of possibility, thereby sketching a landscape of possibilities. In the final section of the paper we look at the place of branching-based possibilities in that larger landscape of possibilities. Our main message is that far from being an outlandish metaphysical extravagancy, branching-based possibilities are epistemically as well as metaphysically basic.
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Acknowledgments
I would like to thank audiences in Bristol and Utrecht for many helpful discussions, and two referees for their comments and criticism. Support by VIDI grant 276-20-013 of the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research is gratefully acknowledged. Special thanks to Sebastian Lutz and Jesse Mulder for their detailed feedback on a previous draft.
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Open Access This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0), which permits any noncommercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited.
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Müller, T. Branching in the landscape of possibilities. Synthese 188, 41–65 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-011-0059-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-011-0059-6