ABSTRACT
David Lewis has proposed the startling and ingenious thesis that ‘actual’, as this term is used in philosophical discussions of modality, is an indexical term. He states this thesis in Counterfactuals in these words:
Our actual world is only one world among others. We call it alone actual not because it differs in kind from all the rest but because it is the world we inhabit. The inhabitants of other worlds may truly call their own worlds actual, if they mean by ‘actual’ what we do; for the meaning we give to ‘actual’ is such that it refers at any world i to that world i itself. ‘Actual’ is indexical, like ‘I’ or ‘here’, or ‘now’: it depends for its reference on the circumstances of utterance, to wit the world where the utterance is located. 1
