David Lewis (philosopher) - Wikipedia David Lewis (philosopher) From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Jump to navigation Jump to search American philosopher (1941–2001) This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "David Lewis" philosopher – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (December 2010) (Learn how and when to remove this template message) David Lewis Born David Kellogg Lewis September 28, 1941 Oberlin, Ohio Died October 14, 2001 (aged 60) Princeton, New Jersey Other names Bruce Le Catt[1] Education Swarthmore College Oxford University Harvard University (Ph.D., 1967) Spouse(s) Stephanie Lewis (m. 1965–2001) Era 20th-century philosophy Region Western philosophy School Analytic Nominalism[2] Perdurantism[3] Institutions Princeton University Doctoral advisor Willard Van Orman Quine Other academic advisors Donald Cary Williams[4] Iris Murdoch[5] Doctoral students Robert Brandom J. David Velleman Main interests Logic · Language · Metaphysics Epistemology · Ethics Notable ideas Possible worlds · Modal realism · Counterfactuals · Counterpart theory · Principal principle · Humean supervenience · Lewis signaling game · The endurantism–perdurantism distinction Descriptive-causal theory of reference[6] · De se Qualitative vs quantitative parsimony[7] Ramsey–Lewis method Gunk[8] Ontological innocence[9] Influences Leibniz · Hume · Carnap · Ryle Quine · Thomas Schelling · Strawson · Smart Influenced Bob Brandom, David Velleman, Peter Railton, John Hawthorne, Barry Loewer, Ted Sider, L.A. Paul, Dean Zimmerman, Mark Johnston, Gideon Rosen, Stathis Psillos[10] David Kellogg Lewis (September 28, 1941 – October 14, 2001) was an American philosopher who is widely regarded as one of the most important philosophers of the 20th century. Lewis taught briefly at UCLA and then at Princeton University from 1970 until his death. He is closely associated with Australia, whose philosophical community he visited almost annually for more than 30 years. Lewis made significant contributions in philosophy of mind, philosophy of probability, epistemology, philosophical logic, aesthetics, philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of time and philosophy of science. In most of these fields he is considered among the most important figures of recent decades. But Lewis is most famous for his work in metaphysics, philosophy of language and semantics, in which his books On the Plurality of Worlds (1986) and Counterfactuals (1973) are considered classics. His works on the logic and semantics of counterfactual conditionals are broadly used by philosophers and linguists along with a competing account from Robert Stalnaker; together the Stalnaker-Lewis theory of counterfactuals has become perhaps the most pervasive and influential account of its type in the philosophical and linguistic literature. His metaphysics incorporated seminal contributions to quantified modal logic, the development of counterpart theory, counterfactual causation, and the position called "Humean supervenience". Most comprehensively in On the Plurality of Worlds, Lewis defended modal realism: the view that possible worlds exist as concrete entities in logical space, and that our world is one among many equally real possible ones. Contents 1 Early life and education 2 Early work on convention 3 Counterfactuals and modal realism 3.1 Realism about possible worlds 3.2 Criticisms 3.3 Influence 4 Later life and death 5 Works 5.1 Books 5.2 Selected papers 6 See also 7 References 8 External links Early life and education[edit] Lewis was born in Oberlin, Ohio, to John D. Lewis, a Professor of Government at Oberlin College, and Ruth Ewart Kellogg Lewis, a distinguished medieval historian, through whom he was the grandson of the Presbyterian minister Edwin Henry Kellogg and the great-grandson of the Presbyterian missionary and Hindi expert Samuel H. Kellogg.[11] The formidable intellect for which he was known later in his life was already manifest during his years at Oberlin High School, when he attended college lectures in chemistry. He went on to Swarthmore College and spent a year at Oxford University (1959–1960), where he was tutored by Iris Murdoch and attended lectures by Gilbert Ryle, H. P. Grice, P. F. Strawson, and J. L. Austin. It was his year at Oxford that played a seminal role in his decision to study philosophy, and that made him the quintessentially analytic philosopher he soon became. Lewis received his Ph.D from Harvard University in 1967, where he studied under W. V. O. Quine, many of whose views he came to repudiate. It was there that his connection with Australia was first established when he took a seminar with J. J. C. Smart, a leading Australian philosopher. "I taught David Lewis," Smart would say in later years, "Or rather, he taught me." Early work on convention[edit] Lewis's first monograph was Convention: A Philosophical Study (1969), which is based on his doctoral dissertation and uses concepts of game theory to analyze the nature of social conventions; it won the American Philosophical Association's first Franklin Matchette Prize for the best book published in philosophy by a philosopher under 40. Lewis claimed that social conventions, such as the convention in most states that one drives on the right (not on the left), the convention that the original caller will re-call if a phone conversation is interrupted, etc., are solutions to so-called "'co-ordination problems'". Co-ordination problems were at the time of Lewis's book an under-discussed kind of game-theoretical problem; most game-theoretical discussion had centered on problems where the participants are in conflict, such as the prisoner's dilemma. Co-ordination problems are problematic, for, though the participants have common interests, there are several solutions. Sometimes one of the solutions is "salient", a concept invented by the game-theorist and economist Thomas Schelling (by whom Lewis was much inspired). For example, a co-ordination problem that has the form of a meeting may have a salient solution if there is only one possible spot to meet in town. But in most cases, we must rely on what Lewis calls "precedent" for a salient solution. If both participants know that a particular co-ordination problem, say "which side should we drive on?", has been solved in the same way numerous times before, both know that both know this, both know that both know that both know this, etc. (this particular state Lewis calls common knowledge, and it has since been much discussed by philosophers and game theorists), then they will easily solve the problem. That they have solved the problem successfully will be seen by even more people, and thus the convention will spread in the society. A convention is thus a behavioral regularity that sustains itself because it serves the interests of everyone involved. Another important feature of a convention is that a convention could be entirely different: one could just as well drive on the left; it is more or less arbitrary that one drives on the right in the US, for example. Lewis's main goal in the book, however, was not simply to provide an account of convention but rather to investigate the "platitude that language is ruled by convention" (Convention, p. 1.) The book's last two chapters (Signalling Systems and Conventions of Language; cf. also "Languages and Language", 1975) make the case that a population's use of a language consists of conventions of truthfulness and trust among its members. Lewis recasts in this framework notions such as truth and analyticity, claiming that they are better understood as relations between sentences and a language rather than as properties of sentences. Counterfactuals and modal realism[edit] Lewis went on to publish Counterfactuals (1973), which gives a modal analysis of the truth conditions of counterfactual conditionals in possible world semantics and the governing logic for such statements. According to Lewis, the counterfactual "If kangaroos had no tails they would topple over" is true if in all worlds most similar to the actual world where the antecedent "if kangaroos had no tails" is true, the consequent that kangaroos in fact topple over is also true. Lewis introduced the now standard "would" conditional operator □→ to capture these conditionals' logic. A sentence of the form A □→ C is true on Lewis's account for the same reasons given above. If there is a world maximally similar to ours where kangaroos lack tails but do not topple over, the counterfactual is false. The notion of similarity plays a crucial role in the analysis of the conditional. Intuitively, given the importance in our world of tails to kangaroos remaining upright, in the most similar worlds to ours where they have no tails they presumably topple over more frequently and so the counterfactual comes out true. This treatment of counterfactuals is a variant of one Robert Stalnaker published a few years earlier, and so this kind of analysis is called Stalnaker-Lewis theory. The crucial areas of dispute between Stalnaker's account and Lewis's are whether these conditionals quantify over constant or variable domains (strict analysis vs. variable-domain analysis) and whether the Limit assumption should be included in the accompanying logic. Linguist Angelika Kratzer has developed a competing theory for counterfactual or subjunctive conditionals, "premise semantics", which aims to give a better heuristic for determining the truth of such statements in light of their often vague and context-sensitive meanings. Kratzer's premise semantics does not diverge from Lewis's for counterfactuals but aims to spread the analysis between context and similarity to give more accurate and concrete predictions for counterfactual truth conditions.[12] Realism about possible worlds[edit] What made Lewis's views about counterfactuals controversial is that whereas Stalnaker treated possible worlds as imaginary entities, "made up" for the sake of theoretical convenience, Lewis adopted a position his formal account of counterfactuals did not commit him to, namely modal realism. On Lewis's formulation, when we speak of a world where I made the shot that in this world I missed, we are speaking of a world just as real as this one, and although we say that in that world I made the shot, more precisely it is not I but a counterpart of mine who was successful. Lewis had already proposed this view in some of his earlier papers: "Counterpart Theory and Quantified Modal Logic" (1968), "Anselm and Actuality" (1970), and "Counterparts of Persons and their Bodies" (1971). The theory was widely considered implausible, but Lewis urged that it be taken seriously. Most often the idea that there exist infinitely many causally isolated universes, each as real as our own but different from it in some way, and that alluding to objects in this universe as necessary to explain what makes certain counterfactual statements true but not others, meets with what Lewis calls the "incredulous stare" (Lewis, On the Plurality of Worlds, 2005, pp. 135–137). He defends and elaborates his theory of extreme modal realism, while insisting that there is nothing extreme about it, in On the Plurality of Worlds (1986). Lewis acknowledges that his theory is contrary to common sense, but believes its advantages far outweigh this disadvantage, and that therefore we should not be hesitant to pay this price. According to Lewis, "actual" is merely an indexical label we give a world when we are in it. Things are necessarily true when they are true in all possible worlds. (Lewis is not the first to speak of possible worlds in this context. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and C.I. Lewis, for example, both speak of possible worlds as a way of thinking about possibility and necessity, and some of David Kaplan's early work is on the counterpart theory. Lewis's original suggestion was that all possible worlds are equally concrete, and the world in which we find ourselves is no realer than any other possible world.) Criticisms[edit] This theory has faced a number of criticisms. In particular, it is not clear how we could know what goes on in other worlds. After all, they are causally disconnected from ours; we can't look into them to see what is going on there.[13] A related objection is that, while people are concerned with what they could have done, they are not concerned with what people in other worlds, no matter how similar to them, do. As Saul Kripke once put it, a presidential candidate could not care less whether someone else, in another world, wins an election, but does care whether he himself could have won it (Kripke 1980, p. 45). Another criticism of the realist approach to possible worlds is that it has an inflated ontology—by extending the property of concreteness to more than the singular actual world it multiplies theoretical entities beyond what should be necessary to its explanatory aims, thereby violating the principle of parsimony, Occam's razor. But the opposite position could be taken on the view that the modal realist reduces the categories of possible worlds by eliminating the special case of the actual world as the exception to possible worlds as simple abstractions. Possible worlds are employed in the work of Kripke[14] and many others, but not in the concrete sense Lewis propounded. While none of these alternative approaches has found anything near universal acceptance, very few philosophers accept Lewis's brand of modal realism. Influence[edit] At Princeton, Lewis was a mentor of young philosophers, and trained dozens of successful figures in the field, including several current Princeton faculty members, as well as people now teaching at a number of the leading philosophy departments in the U.S. Among his most prominent students are Robert Brandom at the University of Pittsburgh, L.A. Paul at Yale, Cian Dorr and David Velleman at NYU, Peter Railton at Michigan, and Joshua Greene at Harvard. His direct and indirect influence is evident in the work of many prominent philosophers of the current generation. Later life and death[edit] Lewis suffered from severe diabetes for much of his life, which eventually grew worse and led to kidney failure. In July 2000 he received a kidney transplant from his wife Stephanie. The transplant allowed him to work and travel for another year, before he died suddenly and unexpectedly from further complications of his diabetes, on October 14, 2001.[15] Since his death a number of posthumous papers have been published, on topics ranging from truth and causation to philosophy of physics. Lewisian Themes, a collection of papers on his philosophy, was published in 2004. A 2015 poll of philosophers conducted by Brian Leiter ranked Lewis the fourth most important Anglophone philosopher active between 1945 and 2000, behind only Quine, Kripke, and Rawls.[16] Works[edit] Books[edit] Convention: A Philosophical Study, Harvard University Press 1969. Counterfactuals, Harvard University Press 1973; revised printing Blackwell 1986. Semantic Analysis: Essays Dedicated to Stig Kanger on His Fiftieth Birthday, Reidel 1974. On the Plurality of Worlds, Blackwell 1986. Parts of Classes, Blackwell 1991. Lewis published five volumes containing 99 papers—almost all the papers he published in his lifetime. They discuss his counterfactual theory of causation, the concept of semantic score, a contextualist analysis of knowledge, and a dispositional value theory, among many other topics. Philosophical Papers, Vol. I (1983) includes his early work on counterpart theory and the philosophy of language and of mind. Philosophical Papers, Vol. II (1986) includes his work on counterfactuals, causation, and decision theory, where he promotes his principal principle[17] about rational belief. Its preface discusses Humean supervenience, the name Lewis gave to his overarching philosophical project. Papers in Philosophical Logic (1998). Papers in Metaphysics and Epistemology (1999) contains "Elusive Knowledge" and "Naming the Colours," honored by being reprinted in the Philosopher's Annual for the year they were first published. Papers in Ethics and Social Philosophy (2000). Lewis's monograph Parts of Classes (1991), on the foundations of mathematics, sketched a reduction of set theory and Peano arithmetic to mereology and plural quantification. Very soon after its publication, Lewis became dissatisfied with some aspects of its argument; it is currently out of print (his paper "Mathematics is megethology," in "Papers in Philosophical Logic," is partly a summary and partly a revision of "Parts of Classes"). Selected papers[edit] "Counterpart Theory and Quantified Modal Logic." Journal of Philosophy 65 (1968): pp. 113–126. "General semantics." Synthese, 22(1) (1970): pp. 18–67. "The Paradoxes of Time Travel." American Philosophical Quarterly, April (1976): pp.  145–152. "Truth in Fiction." American Philosophical Quarterly 15 (1978): pp. 37–46. "How to Define Theoretical Terms." Journal of Philosophy 67 (1979): pp. 427–46. "Scorekeeping in a Language Game." Journal of Philosophical Logic 8 (1979): pp. 339–59. "Mad pain and Martian pain." Readings in the Philosophy of Psychology Vol. I. N. Block, ed. Harvard University Press (1980): pp. 216–222. "Are We Free to Break the Laws?" Theoria 47 (1981): pp. 113–21. "New Work for a Theory of Universals." Australasian Journal of Philosophy 61 (1983): pp. 343–77. "What Experience Teaches." in Mind and Cognition by William G. Lycan, (1990 Ed.) pp. 499–519. Article omitted from subsequent editions. "Elusive Knowledge", Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 74/4 (1996): pp. 549–567. See also[edit] American philosophy List of American philosophers Canberra Plan Possible world Modal realism Extended modal realism References[edit] ^ Guglielmi, Giorgia (1 August 2017). "Philosophy journal corrects 35-year-old article 'written' by a cat". Science. ^ "Review of Gonzalo Rodriguez-Pereyra, Resemblance Nominalism: A Solution to the Problem of Universals" – ndpr.nd.edu ^ Lewis, D. K. 1986. On the Plurality of Worlds Oxford: Blackwell. ^ Wolterstorff, Nicholas (November 2007). "A Life in Philosophy". Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association. 81 (2): 93–106. JSTOR 27653995. ^ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/david-lewis/ ^ Stefano Gattei, Thomas Kuhn's 'Linguistic Turn' and the Legacy of Logical Empiricism: Incommensurability, Rationality and the Search for Truth, Ashgate Publishing, 2012, p. 122 n. 232. ^ "On Quantitative and Qualitative Parsimony" by Maciej Sendłak, Metaphilosophy 49(1–2):153–166 (2018). ^ "David Lewis's Metaphysics" ^ "An Argument for the Ontological Innocence of Mereology" ^ Stathis Psillos, Scientific Realism: How Science Tracks Truth, Routledge, 1999, p. xxiii. ^ Princeton Alumni Weekly, Volume 42, Princeton University Press, 1941. ^ Kratzer, Angelika (2012). Modals and Conditionals: New and Revised Perspectives. Oxford University press. pp. chapter 3. ISBN 9780199234691. ^ Robert Stalnaker, Inquiry, MIT Press, 1984, p. 49: "But if other possible worlds are causally disconnected from us, how do we know anything about them?" ^ "Naming and Necessity". In Semantics of Natural Language, edited by D. Davidson and G. Harman. Reidel, 1980 (1972), pp. 253–355. ^ "David Kellogg Lewis". The New York Times. October 20, 2001. David Kellogg Lewis, a metaphysician and a philosopher of mind, language and logic at Princeton University, died on Sunday at his home in Princeton. He was 60. The cause was heart failure, Princeton University said. Mr. Lewis was once dubbed a mad-dog modal realist for his idea that any logically possible world you can think of actually exists. He believed, for instance, that there was a world with talking donkeys. ^ Leiter, Brian. "Most Important Anglophone philosophers, 1945-2000: the top 20". Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog. Retrieved 6 September 2020. ^ A Subjectivist's Guide to Objective Chance, Philosophical Papers of David Lewis, Volume 2, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986, pp. 83–132. External links[edit] Weatherson, Brian. "David Lewis". In Zalta, Edward N. (ed.). Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Hall, Ned. "David Lewis's Metaphysics". In Zalta, Edward N. (ed.). Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Dixon, scott. "David Lewis". Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 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Related topics Metaphysics Philosophy of artificial intelligence / information / perception / self Category Philosophers category Project Task Force  Philosophy portal Authority control BIBSYS: 90176976 BNF: cb131927319 (data) CANTIC: a1044287x GND: 122564553 ISNI: 0000 0001 0931 4098 LCCN: n82162915 LNB: 000028719 NDL: 01033617 NKC: js20020325003 NTA: 071708316 PLWABN: 9810619761005606 SELIBR: 305980 SUDOC: 029629489 Trove: 1513864 VIAF: 108486628 WorldCat Identities: lccn-n82162915 Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=David_Lewis_(philosopher)&oldid=997910869" Categories: 1941 births 2001 deaths 20th-century American non-fiction writers 20th-century American philosophers 21st-century American non-fiction writers 21st-century American philosophers American ethicists American logicians American male non-fiction writers American metaphysics writers Analytic philosophers Burials at Princeton Cemetery Epistemologists Harvard University alumni Kidney transplant recipients Metaphysicians Moral philosophers Ontologists Philosopher's Annual Prize winners Philosophers of art Philosophers of culture Philosophers of education Philosophers of ethics and morality Philosophers of language Philosophers of logic Philosophers of mind Philosophers of science Princeton University faculty Swarthmore College alumni Hidden categories: Articles with short description Short description is different from Wikidata Articles needing additional references from December 2010 All articles needing additional references Articles with hCards Articles with Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy links Webarchive template wayback links Wikipedia articles with BIBSYS identifiers Wikipedia articles with BNF identifiers Wikipedia articles with CANTIC identifiers Wikipedia articles with GND identifiers Wikipedia articles with ISNI identifiers Wikipedia articles with LCCN identifiers Wikipedia articles with LNB identifiers Wikipedia articles with NDL identifiers Wikipedia articles with NKC identifiers Wikipedia articles with NTA identifiers Wikipedia articles with PLWABN identifiers Wikipedia articles with SELIBR identifiers Wikipedia articles with SUDOC identifiers Wikipedia articles with Trove identifiers Wikipedia articles with VIAF identifiers Wikipedia articles with WORLDCATID identifiers Navigation menu Personal tools Not logged in Talk Contributions Create account Log in Namespaces Article Talk Variants Views Read Edit View history More Search Navigation Main page Contents Current events Random article About Wikipedia Contact us Donate Contribute Help Learn to edit Community portal Recent changes Upload file Tools What links here Related changes Upload file Special pages Permanent link Page information Cite this page Wikidata item Print/export Download as PDF Printable version Languages العربية Català Čeština Dansk Deutsch Eesti Español فارسی Français 한국어 Íslenska Italiano עברית Latina Magyar مصرى Nederlands 日本語 Português Русский Slovenščina Suomi Svenska Українська 中文 Edit links This page was last edited on 2 January 2021, at 21:05 (UTC). 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