In most of these fields he is considered among the most important figures of recent decades. This course offers an advanced approach to philosophy, suitable for students who have some.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. An undergraduate course offered by the School of Philosophy. Follow them to stay up to date.
We can imagine the impossible, provided we do not imagine it in perfect detail and all at once. He made substantial contributions to philosophy of language, philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, epistemology, decision theory, and most significantly metaphysics.David Kellogg Lewis. David Lewis (1941-2001) was one of the most influential analytic philosophers of the twentieth century. 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.About Lewis’s letters. His metaphysics incorporated seminal contributions to quantified modal logic, the development of counterpart theory, counterfactual causation, and the position called "Humean supervenience". 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.
It was there that his connection with Australia was first established when he took a seminar with J. Quine, many of whose views he came to repudiate. Lewis received his Ph.D from Harvard University in 1967, where he studied under W.
But in most cases, we must rely on what Lewis calls "precedent" for a salient solution. 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. Sometimes one of the solutions is "salient", a concept invented by the game-theorist and economist Thomas Schelling (by whom Lewis was much inspired). 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. 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'". "I taught David Lewis," Smart would say in later years, "Or rather, he taught me."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.
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. A convention is thus a behavioral regularity that sustains itself because it serves the interests of everyone involved. That they have solved the problem successfully will be seen by even more people, and thus the convention will spread in the society. (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.
Lewis introduced the now standard "would" conditional operator □→ to capture these conditionals' logic. 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 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.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.
Realism about possible worldsWhat 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. 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. 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. Variable-domain analysis) and whether the Limit assumption should be included in the accompanying logic. 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.
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. 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). 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). The theory was widely considered implausible, but Lewis urged that it be taken seriously.
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. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and C.I. (Lewis is not the first to speak of possible worlds in this context.
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