REAL TIMES AND POSSIBLE WORLDS by Heather Dyke This is a preprint of an article whose final and definitive form is published in Robin Le Poidevin (ed.) Questions of Time and Tense (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998): 93‐117. There are ways in which David Lewis' theory of genuine modal realism 1 is analogous to a tenseless token-reflexive account of time. At the semantic level Lewis offers an indexical account of actuality which is formally analogous to an indexical account of temporal terms such as 'now' and 'present'. At the ontological level there appears to be an analogy between Lewis' account of all possible worlds being equally real, and the doctrine of the tenseless theory that all times are equally real. My concern in this essay is to examine this apparent analogy between these two theories. How strong is it? How closely does it bind the two theories together? Is it strong enough to commit a tenseless theorist, by parity of reasoning, to genuine modal realism? My attempt to answer these questions will involve a close examination of each theory; an analysis of some attempts to undermine the analogy, and a consideration of some attempts to reinforce it. Ultimately I hope to prove that, as a proponent of the new tenseless token- reflexive theory of time, I am not forced to countenance Lewis' plurality of worlds. 1. The New Tenseless Token-Reflexive Theory of Time Originally espoused by Mellor (1981), this is the theory that, although tense is ineliminable from thought and language, nevertheless it does not constitute part of temporal reality. So the theory does not aim to provide an analytic reduction of all tensed sentences to tenseless sentences. It recognizes that this is not possible. Instead, it claims to provide an ontological reduction of tense to tenseless temporal relations. This is achieved by giving the truth conditions of tensed sentences in entirely tenseless terms.