For instance,
“If it is necessary that water is H
2O, then this strictly implies
that the fact that tomorrow is Taco Tuesday strictly implies that water is H
2O.” That weird sort of modal statement hardly
captures the
kind of necessary
connections in nature that Aristotelians posit when they affirm the reality of
causal powers.
Now, David
Lewis famously held that every possible world is as real as the actual
world. And as Anjum and Mumford point
out, this provides a way to read even statements in modal logic in a Humean
manner that denies any intrinsic causal connections between things. The truth of the statement that