In philosophical logic, the concept of an impossible world (sometimes non-normal world) is used to model certain phenomena that cannot be adequately handled using ordinary possible worlds. An impossible world, w, is the same sort of thing as a possible world (whatever that may be), except that it is in some sense "impossible." Depending on the context, this may mean that some contradictions are true at w, that the normal laws of logic or of metaphysics fail to hold at w, or both.
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Famous quotes containing the words impossible and/or world:
“I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.
In time the curtain-edges will grow light.
Till then I see what’s really always there:
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,
Making all thought impossible but how
And where and when I shall myself die.”
—Philip Larkin (1922–1986)
“... I was crying partly because I felt that this was expected of me, partly from genuine repentance, but partly also because of a deeper grief which is peculiar to childhood and not easy to convey: a sense of desolate loneliness and helplessness, of being locked up not only in a hostile world but in a world of good and evil where the rules were such that it was actually not possible for me to keep them.”
—George Orwell (1903–1950)