A sports reporter might say that in a competition all the participants
realize their potentialities or possibilities. When an athlete performs
far below his usual standard, it can be said that it was possible for
him to do better. But the idea of fair play requires that this use of
'possible' refers to another com- petition. It is presumed that the best
athlete wins and that no real possibility of doing better is left
unrealized in a competition. Here we have a use of language, a language
game, in which modal notions are used so as to imply that if something
is possible, it is realized. This idea does not belong to the general
presuppositions of current ordinary usage. It is, nevertheless, not
difficult to fmd other similar examples outside of the language of
sports. It may be that such a use of modal notions is sometimes
calculated to express that in the context in question there are no real
alternative courses of events in contradistinction to other cases in
which some possible alternatives remain unrealized. Even though modal
notions are currently interpreted without the presup- position that each
genuine possibility should be realized at some moment of the actual
history, there are contemporary philosophical models of modalities which
incorporate this presupposition. In his book Untersuchungen tiber den
Modalkalkiil (Anton Hain, Meisenheim am Glan 1952, pp. 16-36), Oscar
Becker presents a statistical interpretation of modal calculi.
