Search Results

This chapter examines the case for natural properties made by David Lewis. Section 5.1 looks at the role such properties play in Lewis’s system. Section 5.2 sets out his reasons for believing in them: that they are required to accommodate Moorean facts about the similarity of objects; and that they are indispensable to philosophical theorizing. Section 5.3 proposes an alternative to natural properties: these are the T-cosy predicates, defined by the role predicates play in theories. Section 5.4 argues that T-cosy predicates can be used to accommodate the Moorean facts as well as natural properties can do; and section 5.5 that where natural properties have an uncontroversially legitimate role to play in philosophical theory, T-cosy predicates will once again do the job. The conclusion is that natural properties constitute unnecessary metaphysical baggage, to be rejected along with the Eliteness Constraint they underpin.

This chapter argues that neither the modal realism of David Lewis nor abstract possible worlds reductionism can satisfy Truthmaker or TSB when it comes to truths of de re modality. On the contrary, both Truthmaker and TSB lead straight to irreducible modal properties. Thus, Truthmaker and TSB have significant implications for the nature of modality and the inventory of irreducible properties.

This chapter examines other ways the Argument from Completeness might be attacked. It identifies two strategies that the realist might deploy in order to avoid the difficulties engendered by the applicability of the Completeness Theorem to the ideal theory. The first is to insist that the theory be cast in some non-first-order language which resists completeness. The second is to allow ideal theory to continue to be rendered in first-order form, but to argue for a semantics in which interpretations take such a new shape that there is no longer any guarantee that any consistent theory has a model in the new sense.

It is desirable to expel absences from the ontology. Phil Dowe's account of preventions and omissions (which involve absences) indicates that they supervene on actual causal states of affairs. Totality states of affairs can then be used to give truthmakers for truths of absence. It is noted that this result was anticipated by Russell. The solution is applied to give truthmakers for the possibility (but not the existence) of what David Lewis calls ‘aliens’.

David Lewis' major contribution to the ontology of classes is to perceive that many‐membered classes are mereological sums of the singletons (unit‐classes of their members: {a, b, c, d, . . .} is identical with {a + {b} + }c} + {d} . . . This raises the question of what singletons are ontologically. My proposal that they are all states of affairs was refuted by Gideon Rosen. But a more limited claim is tenable. Only some singletons are states of affairs. Because set theory is a mathematical system it will produce structures that may not be instantiated, and therefore are no more than possibilities. Nelson Goodman's protest at using set theory to do metaphysics is endorsed. The null class is rejected as an existent.

In some contemporary metaphysics theories, there is an explicit preference or desire, or in some cases demand, for‘Humean’ theories. Humean, or ‘empiricist’ theories of law and of chance are sought; theories that posit irreducible nomic, modal, dispositional, or causal facts are dismissed as un-Humean. David Lewis has characterized a central motivation for some of his theories as a desire to ‘uphold not so much the truth of Humean supervenience but the tenability of it’, a somewhat modest but still mysterious ambition. Why, to put it bluntly, should one want to be Humean? What is the appeal of ‘Humean Supervenience’ such that metaphysical accounts should aspire to it? Although Lewis and others issue calls to rally to Hume's banner, no strategic justification for this campaign is offered. The reason for this reticence is that the motivations will not withstand close scrutiny in the light of day. The aim of this essay is to unshutter the windows.

This chapter is devoted to a thorough-going comparison of Interest-Relativism Invariantism and contextualism. It argues that the contextualist is committed to a worse error-theory than the advocate of Interest-Relativism Invariantism. It concludes by arguing that neither contextualism nor Interest-Relative Invariantism helps with the problem of skepticism.

The thesis that ordinary material objects are mereological sums in the standard sense has been remarkably popular among three-dimensionalists and four-dimensionalists alike. This chapter considers two prominent representatives: Judith Jarvis Thomson, for the three-dimensionalist camp; and David Lewis, for the four-dimensionalist camp. The question of why Thomson's temporalized and modalized version of standard mereology still does not adequately capture the characteristics of ordinary material objects is postponed until Chapter 4. The remainder of the chapter considers Lewis' argument in favor of Unrestricted Composition, in particular in the recently expanded version offered in Theodore Sider's, Four-Dimensionalism: An Ontology of Persistence and Time; as well as Lewis' defence of the Composition-as-Identity Thesis in his Parts of Classes. It is argued that the three-dimensionalist need not be swayed by either component of Lewis' view, since they are ultimately founded on question-begging reasoning.

The models studied in modal logic are set theoretical structures. So one can regard the model theory of modal logic as a branch of set theory. The philosophical question arises: what is the connection between the set theoretical structures studied in the model theory and anything objective in virtue of which one can explain how a study of these structures can yield genuine insights into the principles and inferences of modal logic? One answer to this question is provided by the Modal Realist. Modal Realism is the doctrine that, besides the actual world one lives in, there exists other possible worlds. Modal Realism, in the full-blown sense of the term, maintains that these other possible worlds are not mere abstractions or descriptions.

The early David Lewis was a staunch critic of the Truthmaker Principle. To endorse the principle, he argued, is to accept that states of affairs are truthmakers for contingent predications. But states of affairs violate Hume's prohibition of necessary connections between distinct existences. So Lewis offered to replace the Truthmaker Principle with the weaker principle that ‘truth supervenes upon being’. This chapter argues that even this principle violates Hume's prohibition. Later Lewis came to ‘withdraw’ his doubts about the Truthmaker Principle, invoking counterpart theory to show how it is possible to respect the principle whilst admitting only things that do not violate Hume's prohibition. What this really reveals is that the Truthmaker Principle is no explanatory advance on the supervenience principle. Extending Lewis's use of counterpart theory also allows us to explain away the necessary connections that threatened to undermine his earlier statements of supervenience.

This chapter is devoted to one of the most fascinating figures of the twentieth century, David Lewis. The key to understanding this author of so many works in so many areas of philosophy is to see how his views are related to those of his colleague Saul Kripke as well as to those of his teacher W. V. O. Quine. Like Kripke, Lewis embraced the modalities (necessity and a priority) that Quine rejected. Also like Kripke, Lewis had no sympathy for Quine’s early verificationism or his flights from intension and intention, and he was straightforwardly a realist about science in general. However, despite these similarities with Kripke, Lewis’s analysis of necessity could not be more different from Kripke’s. Quine taught that vindicating naturalism and extensionalism required eliminating intensional facts and rejecting intensional constructions, his student Lewis, however, tried to show that intensional facts are just a species of extensional facts, and that intensional constructions in language are no threat to the integrity of an austere, naturalistic vision of reality.

When we communicate with each other, we interact with an external reality, quite distinct from each other. Nowadays, we take it that this possibly mysterious external reality, through which we communicate, is physical reality. But, what can any of this really amount to? In presenting the Mystery of the Physical, this book presented, in two Formulations, a doctrine concerning the denial of quality. According to the denial of qualities (second formulation), all the world's matter lacks (spatially extensible) qualities, even as a lot lacks anything even easily confused with (such) qualities, however well matter may fare with the other two sorts of basic properties for physical things, the spatial and the propensities. This chapter discusses the concepts of spatially extensible qualities, intelligible physical reality and a principle of constrained contingency, mutually isolated concrete worlds and distinct eons of the actual world, whether the recognized physical properties might be considered spatially extensible qualities, the identity theory of qualities and dispositions, an antinomy of spatially extensible quality, and the philosophy of David Hume and David Lewis.

In the first part of this chapter, I sketch out three grades of modal realism. After developing modal realism, I examine David Lewis's modal theory. I argue that Lewis's theory satisfies none of the grades of modal realism, and that it is really a case of modal reductionism. In particular, I demonstrate that Counterpart Theory is a rejection of the view that objects have properties accidentally or essentially. Moreover, I claim that Lewis merely models things such as propositions, possible worlds or state of affairs, and that he, in fact, is an antirealist with regard to such entities.

This chapter presents a framework that allows us to make sense of the Madhyamaka view that all objects are conventional truths, that is, merely conventionally existent objects. To do this the chapter first discusses a contemporary account of the conventional nature of linguistic signs (offered by David Lewis) and then suggests an expansion that accounts not just for conventionally existent names but also for conventionally existent objects.

Natural necessity is analyzed in terms of “sub-nomic stability” (introduced in Chapter 1). The various species of necessity correspond to the various nonmaximal sets possessing sub-nomic stability. This approach explains what natural necessity has in common with other varieties of necessity by virtue of which they all qualify as varieties of the same thing. Necessities relative to some arbitrary class of facts (merely relative necessities) are thereby distinguished from genuine varieties of necessity (contrary to David Lewis's account of “must”). Different strata of natural law possess different grades of natural necessity. This approach explains what makes one variety of necessity “stronger” than another. Indeed, this approach explains why all varieties of necessity have characteristic places in a single, well-defined ordering from strongest to weakest. It is thus shown how natural laws can be genuinely necessary despite being contingent.

This chapter begins by introducing the heterodox nature of Du Bois's religious voice. Against David Levering Lewis, it argues that despite Du Bois's hostile comments against religion, Du Bois also speaks with a deeply religious register. Du Bois turns his discontent with religion and its affects on American democracy into a religious faith of his own making. The chapter presents five theses on Du Bois's religious imagination, which work to claim Du Bois as an African American pragmatic religious naturalist.

Examines several modern accounts of composition—especially David Lewis's, a version of classical extensional mereology—with the aim of framing a shared question about composition. The problem that Plato sets out to solve is of how to give an account of composition in such a way as to allow that a whole is an individual rather than merely a collection of parts. The relation between composition and identity, and the ontological innocence or otherwise of composition, are both matters right at the heart of Plato's discussions of composition, since on the view of composition that identifies a whole with its parts, a whole is both one and many. Consideration of a passage from the Theaetetus (203–206) gives content to the points of contact established between Platonic and modern discussions of composition and provides the first example of Plato's concern with this model of composition that he rejects.

This chapter examines David Lewis's view that we are temporal parts of animals. It examines three arguments for the view that persisting things have temporal parts–four‐dimensionalism. One is that it solves the problem of temporary intrinsics. The second is that it solves metaphysical problems about the persistence of material objects without the mystery of constitutionalism–though these solutions require a counterpart‐theoretic account of modality. The third is that it solves problems of personal identity–involving fission, for instance–in an attractive way. It is then argued that according to four‐dimensionalism, the bearers of such properties as thinking and acting are momentary stages, forcing us to choose between saying that we don't strictly think and saying that we don't persist.