actualist

Actualist is a term used in philosophy of modality to denote a position about what exists. In its primary sense, actualism holds that only actual objects, properties, and events exist. According to this view, non-actual possibilities do not correspond to real entities such as distinct possible worlds or other concrete existents; their talk is understood as referring to ways the actual world could be or to relations among actual things.

In practice, actualists often treat talk of possibility as a useful or legitimate form of discourse without ontological commitment to real, distinct possible worlds. Some actualists accept abstract or hypothetical states of affairs as true with respect to the actual world, while others reduce possibilities to relations among actual objects and properties or to linguistic and logical tools for expressing contingent truths. This leads to different strategies for explaining modal truths, necessity, and possibility within an only-actualist framework.

Actualism is typically contrasted with possibilism or modal realism, which hold that possible worlds or alternative ways the world might be are real in some sense. The debates focus on how to account for modal facts, the status of abstract objects, the nature of truthmakers, and how to preserve explanatory power about necessity and possibility without expanding existence beyond the actual world.

The term is central to discussions of truth conditions, grounding, and linguistic semantics in philosophy, and it figures in ongoing work on how best to model modality while maintaining a parsimonious ontology. See also modal realism, possibilism, truthmaker theory, and grounding.