Online research in philosophy

In this paper, I will first clarify Lewis’s influence theory of causation by relying on his theory of events. And then I will consider Michael Strevens’s charge against the sufficiency of Lewis’s theory. My claim is that it is legitimate but does not pose as serious a problem for Lewis’s theory as Strevens thinks because Lewis can surmount it by limiting the scope of his theory to causation between concrete events. Michael Strevens raises an alleged counterexample to the necessity of Lewis’s theory that, if successful, would have a very important advantage over other alleged counterexamples. But I will assert that it is simply mistaken. My defense of Lewis’s theory will shed interesting light on the relationship between Lewis’s theory and Salmon’s mark theory.

Murray G. Murphey’s masterful treatment of C. I. Lewis’s philosophy leaves two things amply clear: first, that Lewis struggled with skeptical arguments from Hume throughout his career; and second, that Lewis never adequately resolved the problems raised by those arguments. In this paper I will consider Lewis’s approach to Hume’s skepticism in Mind and the World Order (MWO) and in An Analysis of Knowledge and Valuation (AKV), and I will argue that Lewis’s reply to Hume in these works did not change as dramatically as Murphey claims. Nevertheless, I agree with Murphey that there are two quite different lines of reply discernable in Lewis, and that neither adequately answers Hume. In the final part of the paper I argue that Lewis’s pragmatism gives us resources for an adequate reply to Hume’s skeptical arguments, although it is not the reply that Lewis himself gives.

C. S. Lewis takes us on a profound journey through both heaven and hell in this engaging allegorical tale. Using his extraordinary descriptive powers, Lewis introduces us to supernatural beings who will change the way we think about good and evil.

Consider a cat on a mat. On the one hand, there seem to be just one cat, but on the other there seem to be many things with as good a claim to being a cat, and there seems to be nothing in the vicinity with a better claim. Hence, the problem of the many. In his ‘Many, but Almost One,’ David Lewis offered two solutions. According to the first, only one of the many is indeed a cat, although it is indeterminate exactly which one. According to the second, the many are all cats, but they are almost identical to each other, and hence they are almost one. For Lewis, the two solutions do not compete with each other but are mutually complementary, as each can assist the other. This paper has two aims: first to argue against the first of these two solutions, and then to defend the second as a self-standing solution from Lewis’s considerations to the contrary. In both parts I will assume the certainly plausible but also controversial view on the nature of vagueness, having it that vagueness is a kind of semantic indecision—of which Lewis himself is one of the main defenders.

David Lewis has offered a reply to the standard argument for the claim that the truth of determinism is incompatible with anyone’s being able to do otherwise than she in fact does. Helen Beebee has argued that Lewis’s compatibilist strategy is untenable. In this paper I show that one recent attempt to defend Lewis’s view against this argument fails and then go on to offer my own defense of Lewis’s view.

David Lewis has complained about the truthmaker theory as a version of the correspondence theory of truth (Lewis 2001a; Lewis 2001b). His main criticism is that the truthmaker theory, if combined with the redundancy theory, is not a theory about truth, but only »about the existential grounding of all manner of other things: the flying of pigs, or what-have-you« (Lewis 2001a: 279; Lewis 2001b: 603-4). In his view, to call such a truthmaker theory a theory of truth is a »misnomer« (Lewis 2001a: 279). Lewis does not claim that the truthmaker theory is false, nor does he reject it. Indeed, he expresses agreement with its spirit. But of course it would be an embarrassment to any defender of the truthmaker theory to find out that it is not about truth at all. Indeed, if it were not about truth we should »forget about the ´correspondence theory of truth´«, as the title of Lewis´ paper suggests. Therefore, it is highly desirable for any adherent of the truthmaker theory to look for an understanding of the truthmaker theory which will let it be about truth, and to see whether anything of what Lewis has said provides an argument against it. We will argue that there is such an understanding and that Lewis has not provided any material for an argument against it.

David Lewis's approach to analysing truth in fiction, significantly amended by 'Postscripts' in 1983, has been widely criticized on three main grounds, and it seems fair to say that nearly every writer on the subject thinks that one of these grounds is sufficient to show that Lewis is mistaken. I argue that with some minor revision, Lewis's approach survives all extant objections. Indeed, I judge the Lewis approach to be even more successful than Lewis himself seems to think.

Jonathan Schaffer (2004 ) proposes an ingenious amendment to David Lewis's semantics for counterfactuals. This amendment explicitly invokes the notion of causal independence, thus giving up Lewis's ambitions for a reductive counterfactual account of causation. But in return, it rescues Lewis's semantics from extant counterexamples. I present a new counterexample that defeats even Schaffer's amendment. Further, I argue that a better approach would be to follow the causal modelling literature and evaluate counterfactuals via an explicit postulated causal structure. This alternative approach easily resolves the new counterexample, as well as all the previous ones. Up to now, its perceived drawback relative to Lewis's scheme has been its non-reductiveness. But since the same drawback applies equally to Schaffer's amended scheme, this becomes no longer a point of comparative disadvantage.