Abstract

"Accessibility" is a crucial concept of possible worlds semantics. The simplest approach to accessibility is the "magical theory" that construes this relation as analogous to spatial or temporal relations. In this paper I give a nonmagical structural account of the accessibility relation that can be used to give a necessitarian account of kinds and laws. Laws are characterized in a structural way as stable invariants of the world's gestalt. Finally, I point out how the structural approach can be embedded in a general representational theory of modality