A possibilist justification of the ontology of counterfactuals and forecasted states of economies in economic modelling

Economists, like any other social scientist, apply various methodologies and theories in their research to ultimately tell true stories about the world we live in. Moreover, and specifically, they use counterfactual modelling and forecasting to also construct narratives of possible or future states of the economy, which evade classical empirical validation but nonetheless could be true. In this paper, we firstly claim that there is an intuitive notion that those statements about possible states of the economy, or its future state, could be true even in the absence of this empirical validation. To solve this problem, we will make use of modal logic and Lewisian possible world semantics, the idea that statements containing possibilities and necessities are true if they are true in some or all logically possible worlds. Furthermore, we argue that we can be ontologically committed to these postulated possible or future states of economies via commitment to said possible worlds. In other words, possible world semantics allows us to formally analyse our intuitions about the truthfulness of possibility statements arrived by from the use of postulated entities, economies, and worlds.