  A rather different set of intuitions about situations is that they  are abstract entities of a certain sort: They are  states or conditions, of varying detail and  complexity, that a concrete world could be in — they are  ways that things, as a whole, could   be.[26]  Thus, returning to our original example, one very simple way things  could be is for our philosopher Anne to be in her office. We can now  imagine, as in our example, further detail being successively added  to that description to yield more complex ways things could be: Anne  working at her desk in her office; music being in the background; her husband being on the phone in the next room; her neighbor mowing the  lawn next door; and so on. Roughly speaking, then, a possible world  for an abstractionist is the limit of such a  “process” of consistently extending and adding detail to  some initial state of the world; it is a total way things  could be, a consistent state of the world that settles every  possibility; a consistent state to which no further detail could be  added without rendering it inconsistent. 