Questions tagged [david-lewis]
David Lewis (1941–2001) was an important 20th century analytic philosopher who worked in many areas of philosophy, especially in metaphysics.
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Can, "Intuitions without concepts are blind," be explained in terms of sentences featuring indexicals?
I.e., imagine an assertion like, "This is that." Taken per se, it is like "thoughts without content [that] are empty," but taken de re, is it blind? If I point at some "this&...
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what is difference between "trumping preemption," "preemption," and "not trumping"?
I'm reading Lewis's paper "Causation as Influence," and I understand the example of the Major-Sergeant command as a case of trumping preemption, while the example of Suzy and Billy throwing ...
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The question about "trumping" in Lewis's "causation as influence
In Lewis's "Causation as Influence," in section 1.4 titled "Trumping," Lewis describes a scenario as a case where a causal chain can be said to preempt a potential causal chain ...
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Why did David Lewis believe that all possible worlds exist?
But his largest contributions were in metaphysics. One branch of his
metaphysics was his Hume-inspired reductionism about the nomological.
He developed a position he called “Humean supervenience”, the ...
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Why would modal realist Lewis believe that the answer to the Sleeping Beauty problem is 1/2?
Why is Lewis, of all people, the champion of the halfer position, when modal realism seems to imply the thirder position?
The main argument he seems to make for the halfer position is that, although ...
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Modal dualism: is there a combination of counterpart and transworld-identity theory classifying objects based on which relation they enter into?
Theorists love to be competitive, but often enough we find out that they don't have to be like that. The SEP article on infinitesimals, for example, notes at one point:
It is of interest to note that ...
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Could a being be defined as such that its transworld identity is identical to its in-world identity?
I was reading through Collier[21], which is about Lewisian theism, alongside the SEP article on transworld identity, and have assumed that:
The concept of transworld identity (TI) is not necessarily ...
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A question about David Lewis's refutation of taking possibility as consistency
I’m reading a chapter from David Lewis’s counterfactuals. He says something which I’m confused about, wondering if any of you guys can explain what he's saying...
“ We might take…. ‘Possibly P’ [to ...
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Epistemic access to possible worlds for David Lewis and empiricism
David Lewis believed that possible worlds are real and their existence are similar to actual world. Any world is causally and spatio-temporally disconnected from other worlds. David Lewis was an ...
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Cardinality of the logical space according to David Lewis
I just read an extract of David Lewis's Counterfactuals and he claims there in a footnote on page 90 that there are at least beth_2 possible worlds. He also claims in the very same footnote that "...
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Lewis argument to defend modal realism
In the fourth chapter of "Counterfactuals", David Lewis tries to justify his positions about modal realism. He claims that:
"We might take them [modalities] as metalinguistic predicates ...
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Lewis's truth condition for counterfactuals
According to SEP, Lewis's theory of counterfactual conditionals defines truth for counterfactuals as follows:
[...] the truth condition for the counterfactual “If A were (or had been)
the case, C ...
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Lewis's Counterfactual theory of conditionals
I'm starting to read Lewis' theory of counterfactuals. In his 1973 book, he specifies on page 10-11:
"The left-hand counterfactuls make trounle for the theory that the counterfactual is a strict ...
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"Where" does the counterpart relation subsist?
AFAIK, according to the counterpart theory, it is true of me that I could have lived a different life, if my counterpart in another possible world did live a different life. But where is it true that ...
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Best order to read David Lewis
I have read some papers by Lewis but never one of his full length books... I thought that I might do so.
I am undecided whether to read Counterfactuals or On the plurality of worlds and wondered if ...
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