A centered world, according to

David Kellogg Lewis David (; , "beloved one") (traditional spelling), , ''Dāwūd''; grc-koi, Δαυΐδ, Dauíd; la, Davidus, David; gez , ዳዊት, ''Dawit''; xcl, Դաւիթ, ''Dawitʿ''; cu, Давíдъ, ''Davidŭ''; possibly meaning "beloved one". w ...

, consists of (1) a

possible world A possible world is a complete and consistent way the world is or could have been. Possible worlds are widely used as a formal device in logic, philosophy, and linguistics in order to provide a semantics for intensional and modal logic. Their ...

, (2) an

agent Agent may refer to: Espionage, investigation, and law *, spies or intelligence officers * Law of agency, laws involving a person authorized to act on behalf of another ** Agent of record, a person with a contractual agreement with an insuran ...

in that world, and (3) a time in that world. The concept of centered worlds has

epistemic Epistemology (; ), or the theory of knowledge, is the Outline of philosophy, branch of philosophy concerned with knowledge. Epistemology is considered a major subfield of philosophy, along with other major subfields such as ethics, logic, an ...

as well as

metaphysical Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy that studies the fundamental nature of reality, the first principles of being, identity and change, space and time, causality, necessity, and possibility. It includes questions about the nature of consci ...

uses; for the latter, the three components of a centered world have connections to theories such as

actualism In analytic philosophy, actualism is the view that everything there ''is'' (i.e., everything that has ''being'', in the broadest sense) is actual. Another phrasing of the thesis is that the domain of unrestricted quantification ranges over all a ...

solipsism Solipsism (; ) is the philosophical idea that only one's mind is sure to exist. As an epistemological position, solipsism holds that knowledge of anything outside one's own mind is unsure; the external world and other minds cannot be known and ...

(especially

egocentric presentism Egocentric presentism is a form of solipsism introduced by Caspar Hare in which other persons can be conscious, but their experiences are simply not . Similarly, in related work, Hare argues for a theory of perspectival realism in which other pe ...

and

perspectival realism In Caspar Hare's theory of perspectival realism, there is a defining ''intrinsic'' property that the things that are in perceptual awareness have. Consider seeing object A but not object B. Of course, we can say that the visual experience of A i ...

), and presentism, respectively.

References

Concepts in epistemology Concepts in metaphysics Metaphysics of mind Philosophy of time Possible worlds Theory of mind {{metaphysics-stub