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    The image next to Wittgenstein is actually John Turturro saying ‘If pasta could talk, I’d understand it’.–On a lighter note:…

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    And the image of eyeglasses in the linguistic turn panel are not eyeglasses. (oh wait, I thought we were playing…

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    Like the image next to Kripke’s name, that is in fact not an image of G. E. Moore, either.

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    The image next to Quine is not Quine, either, although at least it bears some resemblance to him, unlike the…

David Lewis on his approach to philosophy, on his education, and other topics (link fixed now)

Brian Leiter

A very entertaining lecture from 1991 [click on the PDF button] (which I learned about via Phillip Bricker's recent review of materials from Lewis's Nachlass).  The lecture contains a crisp statement of Lewis's "conservativism" in philosophy, which is characteristic of most of the Anglophone discipline:

I am a conservative philosopher. Fear not, I don’t mean that I make it my business to glorify the marvellous market and the Republican Party!—What would that have to do with resisting innovation? One thing I do mean is this. I think philosophy has no business challenging the positive convictions of common sense, and no business challenging established results of the natural sciences and mathematics. What should a philosopher do if he discovers a proof that he is the pope?  Boldly follow where argument leads?—No, or not unless he’s the philosopher Karol Wojtyła. Instead he should find the flaw in his proof. If he fails, he should conclude that the proof has a flaw he cannot find. The same goes, say I, if a philosopher discovers a proof that some truths are also false; or that motion or time or value or consciousness or freedom is unreal; or that it is unthinkable that anything exists outside the mind, or outside the text; or that there are no people, and no swizzle-sticks either; or that it is a wide-open scientific question whether anyone has ever believed anything; or that Cantor’s diagonal argument was fallacious; or that we make worlds with words. We should know a reductio ad absurdum when we see it! It is ever so much more likely that a philosophical argument has gone astray than that any of these things is true.

Gramsci's view of "common sense," and his reasons for skepticism about it, seems to me more plausible.

I did find this dig at Rorty and Wittgenstein amusing (and I'm sympathetic to Lewis's view on this score):

I am conservative in another way: I oppose revolutions in philosophy. Weare plagued by them. Their message is always: Stop it! Put down those tired old questions about mind and body, knowledge, value, freedom, universals, and all.  Don’t answer them. Transcend them, debunk them, shake free of them! And then we get some story of how all that bad old philosophy rests on a mistake: how we tried to transcend the limits of experience, how we were bewitched by language, how we aspired to mirror nature, or what not. To me those stories never ring true.  The great questions of philosophy, and a host of subordinate questions, are well-posed. Nobody says we have to be curious about them, or anything else for that matter; but if we are curious, we should carry on investigating them. We should try to ignore the interruptions from the stop-it brigade. And we should try not to forget discoveries from before the latest interruption.

Feel free to comment on other parts of the lecture you found interesting, amusing, provocative.

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27 responses to “David Lewis on his approach to philosophy, on his education, and other topics (link fixed now)”

  1. Steven Hales

    Two things struck me right away: (1) how much these remarks are in the Reid-Moore-Chisholm common-sense tradition, and (2) isn't this the same guy who defended modal realism?

    Reply
  2. Louis

    In response to Hales' comment (1), readers may find the following parallelism between Moore and Lewis on the relationship between philosophy and mathematics amusing:

    Moore:
    "Surely it’s the business of the mathematicians to decide whether particular mathematical propositions are true? And if so what’s the use of the philosopher discussing whether *any* mathematical propositions are true? Suppose he decides they are, can he give better reasons than the mathematicians give? Suppose he decides they aren’t. He’s contradicting the mathematicians. And aren’t they the better judges?" (Lectures on Philosophy, 1966: 185)

    Lewis:
    "I’m moved to laughter at the thought of how *presumptuous* it would be to reject mathematics for philosophical reasons. How would *you* like the job of telling the mathematicians that they must change their ways, and abjure countless errors, now that *philosophy* has discovered that there are no classes?" (Parts of Classes, 1991: 159).

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  3. Eric Winsberg

    And picking $100 over $1,000,000!

    Reply
  4. Michael Shepanski

    "It is ever so much more likely that a philosophical argument has gone astray than that any of these things is true."

    Okay, and if conservatism-as-heuristic leads us to suspect that a philosophical argument has gone astray somewhere, and to hunt for the bug, that's great. But conservatism-as-norm has the opposite effect. It says "That view is radical, and that's the bug right there, so you can stop looking."

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  5. John Collins

    I think Austin was right in claiming that philosophy most often consists of a part where you take it away and a part where you give it back; that is, rarely is there a flat-out rejection of some bit of lore. Instead, the lore is reconstructed, even if this essentially conservative undertaking is sexed up as something more radical. As for Lewis in particular, his commitment to common sense, at least in the philosophy of language, has been regrettably influential without really impeding first-order progress. His paper on adverbs of quantification is a illustrative case. It is genuinely insightful and led to a lot of important work, but it is quite unhinged from his broader philosophical views. Much the same can be said for Davidson’s eventish semantics. The moral, I suppose, is that the conservativeness or not of philosophy is independent of the consequences it may have.

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  6. JDRox

    How much do Lewis and Gramsci actually disagree? I think they are using 'common sense' to mean different things. Lewis's examples of common sense are
    1. That no truths are also false;
    2. That motion, time, value, consciousness, and freedom are real;
    3. That it is thinkable that things exists outside the mind, or outside the text;
    4. That there are people, and artifacts;
    5. That it is not a wide-open scientific question whether anyone has ever believed anything;
    6. That we don't make worlds with words.
    But basically none of that is stuff about which different social strata differ, or that has changed over time, etc., which is how Gramsci describes 'common sense'.

    Reply
  7. Allen Hazen

    For more evidence about how Lewis interpreted his methodological conservatism, see his "Should a materialist believe qualia?" (Australasian Journal of Philosophy 73 (1995), pp. 140-144; repr. in Lewis's 1999 "Papers in Metaphysics and Epistemology"). In some cases, science and philosophical reflection on science (as good Quineans, we ought to see these as forming a single enterprise!) show that there is nothing exactly corresponding to what "common sense" regards as an entity, and we must then wrestle with the question of whether to deny a common-sense claim or find an interpretation on which some portion of what common sense believes comes out true. (Note: His view was that the philosopher should try to minimize rejections of common sense, not that such rejections were always and totally forbidden.)
    As a philosophical method, it relies on personal judgment: just how much revision of common sense is permissible? What portions of a common sense view should an acceptable reinterpretation preserve? There don't seem to be clear rules for these!
    —
    Lewis believed that he was basically Quinean in his metaphilosophy(1,2): Quine had also emphasized conservatism — not making more changes than necessary — as a virtue in theory change. Differences between them on substantive metaphysical questions were due to different judgment about what evidence to look at and what the best way was to balance between the desiderata of conservatism and openness to new evidence. Lewis's infamous realism about possible worlds(3) gives an illustration. One difference is that Lewis put a higher value than Quine on preserving some "common sense" intensional discourse. Allowing for that, Lewis, I think, would have said that his reasons for accepting possible worlds were the same SORT of reasons as Quine's for accepting axiomatic set theory.
    —
    (1) Particularly in later years: Lewis had a sabbatical visit to Harvard in the (?? late 1980s? ?1990s ??) during which he had contact with Quine, and felt more strongly after this the he was in fundamental agreement with Quine in attitude to how one should do philosophy.
    (2) Though, as Sydney Morgenbesser once pointed out to me in conversation, there is an important difference in attitude: for Lewis folk common sense was the basic guide, whereas for Quine science was.
    (3) Lewis also would have said his belief impossible worlds was conservative, that he was adhering to common sense in this. The technical term. "possible world" is philosopher's English (= jargon), but the folk talk of "ways things could have turned out."

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  8. Sam Elgin

    When I saw this post, my initial (and entirely correct!) suspicion was that philosophers would react by saying something along the lines of “How could David Lewis – a defender of modal realism – claim that philosophy is subservient to common sense?!” But as predictable as this response was, it also strikes me as misguided: at best, a misinterpretation of Lewis or, at worst, a misunderstanding of what constitutes common sense.

    We have many common-sense views about many things. It’s common sense that I have hands, that I know where my car is, and that the fact that the sun has always risen in the east gives me some reason to think it will tomorrow. Philosophers have (according to Lewis, in error) disputed all of these. There are also (true) claims that common sense offers no guide to whatsoever. I would hazard a guess that Lewis thought that what the semantic value of ‘Necessarily p’ is is one such claim. I am not a Lewis historian, so I cannot report on what he thought. But if that is what he thought, I would be inclined to agree with him. The semantic values of ordinary language sentences are not the purview of common sense. While common sense may take a stand on skepticism, I see no reason to think it takes a stand on what it is that makes the claim ‘I am necessarily human’ true. By accepting a particular view of the semantic value of these sentences, he does not violate common sense. (Of course, alternate competing semantic views also do not violate common sense – the semantics of modal language just isn’t something that we have common sense beliefs about).

    Perhaps the thought is that Lewis’s view violates common sense by licensing certain existential claims. There are no talking donkeys – but, according to modal realism, the sentence ‘There are talking donkeys’ is true! (After all, there are physical possible worlds where donkeys talk). This too seems to miss the mark. The sentence ‘There are talking donkeys’ is true only in isolated, unusual linguistic contexts – ones where we quantify over absolutely everything. In most circumstances, our quantifiers are restricted to objects that exist in the actual world (at least, according to Lewis. My impression from interacting with linguists is that they agree that most ordinary quantifiers are restricted – usually much more so than a restriction to the actual world). So, typically, the sentence ‘There are no talking donkeys’ is true. Lewis rules that our ordinary utterances involving talking donkeys are – in common linguistic contexts – true.

    (I suspect that some will be tempted to reply to this by citing Lewis’s lack of response to the incredulous stare – but I don’t really see a reason to think that the stare should be interpreted as reporting common sense beliefs).

    None of this is to say that I agree with David Lewis. I am not a modal realist – and I believe that philosophy can (at least sometimes) undermine common sense. But I do not think that his commitment to modal realism shows inconsistency or intellectual hypocrisy.

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  9. Frank Jackson

    The Harvard visit was in 1988. We overlapped. He gave a marvellous graduate seminar on ontology. Many faculty attended but surprisingly few were Harvard faculty.

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  10. Charles Pigden

    David Lewis believed in possible worlds – and believed in them as meaty metaphysical realities – partly because he was a Moorean philosophical conservative and partly because he believed in a Quinean dogma that is emphatically NOT part of science OR common-sense – that the language of the predicate calculus (perhaps with a few tweaks) is adequate to describe reality at the most basic level. When we get right down to it, there are things standing in relations and possessing properties and that’s it. Quine, of course, believed this, hence his hostility of modality and to modal logic. One can make a little room for a few modal propositions but only on condition that the modality is effectively trivialised. (Quine’s debates with Ruth Barcan Marcus were not his finest hour.) But both science and common-sense are absolutely chocka with modal claims (including , of course, counterfactuals). And Lewis was too much of a Moorean to reject them en bloc. So they had to be translated into the vocabulary of the predicate calculus. But you can’t make sense of modal claims in a fundamentally non-modal meta-language unless you quantify over possible worlds. And being an ‘On What There Is’ Quinean (we are committed to the reality of the things we quantify over) this meant that he had to believe in possible worlds. The price of ‘ideological’ restraint (reality can be adequately described without the aid of modal concepts, hence no modalities at the basic level) was massive ontological inflation.

    In the early nineteen-nineties, Rebecca Entwisle and I drafted a paper ‘Spread Worlds, Plentitude and Modal Realism: a Problem for David Lewis’ which, for a variety of reasons (my poor work habits, my political preoccupations and the fact that Rebecca dropped out of philosophy) was not published until 2012. We discussed this paper extensively with David as you can see from his letters to Rebecca and myself in Beebee and Fisher eds The Philosophical Letter of David Lewis. We were trying to argue that in order to save his system from a contradiction David had to accept at least one primitive modality which would undermine its entire rationale. Whether we were right or wrong about this, is not the point. The point is that in his extensive discussions with Rebecca and myself, David did not deny the above rationale for his metaphysical system. Here is what we wrote:

    ‘Although sometimes denounced as a Meinongian, indeed a relentless Meinongian (Lycan1979), Lewis is, in fact, a rather heterodox Quinean. His aim is to explicate the modal concepts in terms of first order logic plus an ontology of possibilia. He retains a Quinean ideology, that is, the conviction that the resources of first-order logic, quantifiers, predicates, truth-functional connectives and the possible assistance of truth and satisfaction, are adequate to describe reality. But unlike Quine (who prefers to believe there are no such things) Lewis recognizes modal facts. To accommodate these facts within a Quinean ideology, to explain the modalities in terms of quantification theory, Lewis has to invent more reality. The price of his ideological restraint is ontological inflation. He must posit an infinity of objects to quantify over. But it is important to realize that despite his ontological exuberance, what Lewis is putting forward is a reductive theory. It is just that the reductions are conceptual rather than ontological. The aim is to take the modality out of modality, to reduce modal to non-modal discourse, even if the universe of discourse has to be inordinately expanded to do so.’

    David did not demur.

    Moral: David may have thought of himself a as a Moorean philosophical conservative which in some ways he was. But the fundamental driver of his philosophy both here, and I suspect, in other areas, was a Quine-derived philosophical dogma that is neither derived from our best science nor dictated by common-sense.

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  11. assc prof

    I wonder whether the "let's make as many sentences come out as true" conservativism of Lewis (or at least those inspired by him) is that different from the "common sense" of Berkeley. After all, Berkeley would probably think he's also trying to save as many sentences as possible, including "there are tables," "pain doesn't exist unperceived," etc. But as everyone knows in Berkeley's case, it's possible to save a sentence by radically altering the framework which makes it true. I think the same can be said for (some) Lewisian metaphysics: yes, you got your sentences, but by grounding their truth in a world that is very much different from that of common sense.

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  12. Charles Pigden

    I think assc prof is right. There are similarities between Berkeley’s approach and Lewis’s. But there are also important differences.

    Berkeley subscribes to an empiricist psycho-semantics, a theory of mind with implications for the theory of meaning. All genuine concepts are composed of copies of past sensations. So no sentences can be meaningful unless they can be translated into a language in which all the categorematic expressions (at least!) are definable in terms of sensations. (Berkeley’s notion of notions gives him a little wiggle-room here but it will do as a first approximation.) Berkeley thinks that English IS such a language EXCEPT when it is expressing the meaningless maunderings of scholastics and materialist philosophers, since the suspect words that they employ cannot be defined in terms of past sensations. . It is not just false but *meaningless* to suppose that there are material objects as conceived (or misconceived) by materialistic philosophers or the non-entities propounded by potentially infidel mathematicians, since these are NOT definable in terms of sensations. However, to make this credible Berkeley has to ‘save the sentences’ of everyday material-object talk by explaining how sentences containing expressions that *apparently* refer to mind-independent material objects *actually* refer to composites of sensations or potential sensations. (It is a bit misleading say that material object sentences can be *translated into* sentences about sensations, since, in Berkeley’s view, sensations are what they really about already.)

    Lewis subscribes to a *metaphysical* thesis (*not* a theory of meaning), namely that at the most basic level the language of first-order logic is sufficient to describe reality, since there are only things possessing properties (or perhaps satisfying potential predicates) and standing in relations to one another. (This is rough because Lewis did not really believe in properties or relations as conceived by the likes of David Armstrong.) But he takes a vast array of everyday modal claims to be true or truish. So to vindicate their (approximate) truth – NOT their meaningfulness – they have to be translated (or to be translatable into) the terminology of possible worlds, which Lewis takes to be ontologically real.

    So Lewis, like Berkeley has a project of ‘saving the sentences’ (modal sentences in Lewis’s case, material-object sentences in Berkeley’s) by ‘translating’ them (note the scare quotes!) into a preferred terminology. Thus far they are alike.

    But they are also importantly different.
    1) Lewis, unlike Berkeley does not suppose that the sentences he wants to ‘save’ would be *meaningless* if they could not be ‘translated’ into his preferred terminology. He does not adopt what I call a ‘coercive theory of meaning’. He was not a man to do down his opponents by dismissing their claims as nonsensical or lacking in intellectual content.. He was happy to argue with people on their own terms. Perhaps his favourite discussion-partner was David Armstrong whose fundamental metaphysics involved real universals in a way that Lewis’s did not. There was never any suggestion that Armstrong’s metaphysics was unintelligible. On the contrary DKL helped him to develop it, as in his paper ‘New Work for a Theory of Universals’. In arguing with Rebecca and myself he never suggested that primitive modalities were *unintelligible*, only that it would be better, from a metaphysical point of view, to do without them.

    2) Berkeley , unlike Lewis claims that the ‘translations’ have (in effect) *already been made* since what everyday material object claims really amount to are sophisticated claims about actual and possible sensations (if not in our minds then the mind of God). Lewis, by contrast, is self-consciously propounding a *novel* analysis of modal talk. ‘X is possible’ (as employed by ordinary speakers) does not *mean* ‘There is a possible world in which X’. Rather (in his view), that is what must be the case if something like ‘X is possible’ is to be *true*.

    3) In other words , Lewis was an honest philosopher who did not try to win cheap victories by bogus unintelligibility claims or forced interpretations of pre-existing terminology, whereas Berkeley was not.

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  13. Allen Hazen

    Charles Pigden– You are certainly right to emphasize Quine's … umm, disdain … for modal and other intensional language: he spoke of the "flight from intensionality" as one of th basic themes of his philosophy. It's surely a weakness in his philosophical writing that he didn't make more of an effort to explore the uses of intensional notions, and to do more in the way of showing how to eliminate them in contexts where they seem to be doing real work: Lewis can be seen as one who tried to make an honest philosopher out of Quine! … Quine did (I think this is somewhere in Word and Object, but I may be wrong) point to the propositional attitude concepts of "folk psychology" as the hardest intensional notions to get rid of. (They play a central role in lot of our thinking, and we'd miss them immediately if we simply abjured their use, in a way that Quine didn't think he'd miss "necessity" — he thought it was just a way of talking about analyticity, and we all know how important he thought THAT was — and counterfactuals.) There's a line of thought here I'd speculatively attribute to Quine, though I don't know of his ever putting it into writing. One of Quine's closest friends on the Harvard faculty was B.F. Skinner, and much of Skinner's work can be seen as an attempt to formulate a non-intensional psychology: Skinner's concept of drive can be seen as an extensional substitute for the intensional notion of desire. MAYBE Quine thought that (whatever sloppiness we allowed ourselves in ordinary life), a scientific world view would be able to make do with some development of Skinner's psychology. … Lewis, I think, was more public about his philosophical motives: you don't have to speculate as much about WHY he had the aims he did.

    (Frank Jackson — Thanks for the year of Lewis's visit to Cambridge and Quine!)

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  14. Charles Pigden

    In response Allen Hazen, here is a slightly edited version of a comment that I posted on Hilary Putnam’s ‘Sardonic Comment’ blog in 2014. Its an attempt make sense of Quine’s scepticism about meanings and intensions which had always seemed to me to be absolutely bonkers. 



    To prove: ‘Meaning’ is not a scientifically respectable concept. There are no meanings in any scientifically respectable sense. This does not mean that nothing ever means anything. Rather meanings are like sakes. We do things for the sake of things, but sakes are not the kinds of things that will figure in a scientifically respectable theory or in a scientifically respectable philosophy. Meanings, like sakes, cannot bear any intellectual weight. 


    1) For the meaning of an expression or set of expressions to be an empirically (and hence scientifically) respectable notion, meaning would have to be equivalent to empirical significance (or a determinate contribution to empirical significance). 
[Quine thinks that the meanings (if any) of subsentences are derivative from the sentences in which they are semantically equipped to appear.] 

    2) For an individual sentence to be empirically significant it would have to have determinate verification-conditions.
    
3) No individual sentence has determinate verification-conditions. [Quine/Duhem: Whether a given set of observations confirms or disconfirms a sentence depends upon what else we assume.]
    
4) So the ‘unit of empirical significance’ (if any) must be an entire theory or maybe the whole of science.
    
5) But entire theories do not have verification-conditions, determinate or otherwise [Popper (Putnam had noted the surprising praise of Popper in ‘The Pursuit of Truth’.)]. 

    6) So entire theories do not have empirical significance [From 5) & 2)].
    
7) So entire theories do not have meanings in any (scientifically respectable) sense (and the same goes for the whole of science). [From 6) & 1).]

    8) Since subsentential expressions only have (scientifically respectable) meanings if the sentences in which they appear have (scientifically respectable) meanings, and since sentences only have (scientifically respectable) meanings if the larger theories in which they appear have (scientifically respectable) meanings, NO expressions have (scientifically respectable) meanings.



    Corollary 1. Analyticity, conceived as truth in virtue of meaning, is not a scientifically respectable concept, since we have no scientifically respectable conception of meaning. 



    Corollary 2. If Necessity has to be understood in terms of analyticity, then Necessity is not a scientifically respectable notion either. 



    Corollary 3. Carnap’s idea that ontological claims only make (scientifically respectable) sense in the context of a framework relies on a concept of meaning that is analogous to a sake. Either NOTHING makes scientifically respectable sense, including Carnap’s context-relative ontological claims, or we adopt a loose and colloquial conception of meaning in which context-free ontological claims such as Quine’s ‘There are Numbers’ make just as much sense as Carnap’s context-bound claims.

    Objection: Couldn’t the empirical significance of any linguistic item from a sentence on up be defined in terms of its FALSIFICATION conditions? In that case we could derail Quine’s argument at step 2). 



    This wont’ work 

A) Because individual sentences don’t have determinate empirical falsification conditions. [Quine/Duhem strikes again.]

    Thus instead of 3) we would get



    3#) No individual sentence has determinate falsification-conditions. [Quine/Duhem: Whether a given set of observations confirms or disconfirms a sentence depends upon what else we assume.]

    

B) Because entire theories don’t have determinate empirical falsification-conditions either – auxiliary conditions, if only of the form ‘God isn’t messing with the system’, are always necessary. (A point Putnam made in his critique of Popper and to which Popper responds with grumpy incomprehension.) So we would still get a version of step 5) namely:



    5#) Not even entire theories have determinate falsification-conditions [Putnam versus Popper]. 



    C) Because even if the totality of science (conceived of as great big heap of possible sentences) DOES have determinate falsification conditions and hence empirical significance, it can’t pass its (scientifically respectable) meaning back down to the individual sentences of which it is composed. On this scenario, the totality of science would be the ONLY thing with a scientifically respectable meaning. So we would get a version of conclusion 8) namely

    

8#) NO expression except the set of propositions expressing the totality of science has a (scientifically respectable) meaning.



    This would be quite enough for Quine to draw his corollaries 1, 2 & 3. 

The underlying assumption is that meaning is no good unless it can be given an epistemic analysis. But it can’t be given an adequate epistemic analysis. Hence meaning is no good. 



    The way out, I suggest, is to reject the underlying assumption. Meaning cannot and should not be given an epistemic analysis. 
—————————-

    Okay getting back to DKL. Unlike Quine he had no qualms about a non-epistemic conception truth. Perhaps this explains some of the differences between them.

    Reply
  15. Charles Pigden

    Getting back to the general theme of conservatism in philosophy, there is an interesting remark by Russell about Moore: 'The trouble with Moore is that he believes everything that his nurse told him'. Russell was of course a far more radical philosopher than Moore.

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  16. Michael Shepanski

    Allen Hazen writes:

    "Lewis put a higher value than Quine on preserving some "common sense" intensional discourse. Allowing for that, Lewis, I think, would have said that his reasons for accepting possible worlds were the same SORT of reasons as Quine's for accepting axiomatic set theory."

    I agree, but I would add that Lewis was much, much more conservative than Quine. As I see it, Quine's commitment to conservatism was negligible and Lewis's was over the top.

    First Quine: though he's often cited as a conservative, the textual evidence is not strong. Take "Two Dogmas", for instance. When he says that "conservatism figures in such choices", his examples are his choices to say that there are brick houses on Elm Street and that there are no centaurs; but he gives us no reason to doubt that a non-conservative, who only aims for the simplest theory that fits experience, would make the same choices; so he isn't exactly showing conservatism at work. And, across his whole theory of the world, including objects and sets but not modality or intensional objects, I've never spotted making a claim that needs conservatism for support.

    Lewis, on the other hand, makes passionate appeals to conservatism, and to me they usually look like bait-and-switch. The bait is conservatism as heuristic, i.e. a tactic for choosing theories that have a high epistemic score; and the switch is to conservatism as norm, i.e. conservatism as a component in the score. E.g., he's at it in _On The Plurality of Worlds_ p. 134:

    >>It is far beyond our power to weave a brand new fabric of theory _ex nihilo_, so we must perforce conserve the one we've got. A worthwhile theory must be credible, and a credible theory must be conservative. It cannot gain, and it cannot deserve, credence if it disagrees with too much of what we thought before.<<

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  17. Michael Shepanski

    Allen Hazen writes: "Quine did … point to the propositional attitude concepts of "folk psychology" as the hardest intensional notions to get rid of."

    I'm not sure whether this is the quote you had in mind, but in "Intensions Revisited" he wrote "In thus writing off modal logic I find little to regret. Regarding the propositional attitudes, however, I cannot be so cavalier."

    I can confirm, from my own interactions with Quine (1993), that he was very open to the prospect of regimented propositional attitude ascriptions that don't reduce to behaviour, so long as they scored well enough on the virtues of logical explicitness, simplicity, and empirical correctness (and, derivatively, extensionality). He wasn't worried then about deviations from folk psychology, just as he wasn't worried when he wrote (in "Quantifiers and Propositional Attitudes") "We may treat a mouse's fear of a cat as his fearing true a a certain English sentence. This is unnatural without being therefore wrong."

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  18. Frank Jackson

    Quine must have meant this in a sense in which it would be a misunderstanding to ask, Why English rather than say German?

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  19. Michael Shepanski

    In the same paper ("Quantifiers and Propositional Attitudes"), Quine goes on to say that the attitude ascriptions must be relativized to language. So yes, on that view it would be a misunderstanding to ask "Why English rather than German", because the mouse who fears-true 'The cat will eat me' in English also believes-true 'Die Katze wird mich fressen' in German.

    (For what it's worth, I disagree with Quine on that point. Chapter 10 of my book argues that, when we ascribe sentential content to nonverbal creatures, the quoted sentences should be in the same language that we, the ascribers, use outside of quotes. But that is another story.)

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  20. Michael Shepanski

    (Correction: for "believes-true" read "fears-true".)

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  21. Allen Hazen

    Michael Shepanski– Thank you for the Quine reference! (I think he may have said similar things elsewhere as well.)
    And especially thanks for the report of your late (1993) conversations with Quine!
    … As for construing propositional attitudes as relations (holds-true(x,y), etc) between the subjects of attitudes and sentences… Quine, longtime protosyntactician that he was, knew that sentences and (natural) numbers were pretty much the same thing (and in "Ontological Relativity") argues that reference to sentences and reference to numbers are not objectively distinguishable. So a regimentation of attitude talk that represented it as relations to sentences would be parallel in spirit to a regimentation of physics that treated things like length, mass, temperature &c as relations between physical objects and numbers (length-in-centimetres(x,y), etc). (Quine's old friend Carnap, in his "Introduction to the Philosophy of Science," devotes a section to commending this way of thinking about "physical quantities.")

    Giving him a quick reply to Frank Jackson's (18) objection: the choice of English sentences rather than those of some other language is analogous to the choice of whether to write your physics textbook in terms of a predicate "length-in-centimetres(x,y)" rather than in terms of a predicate "length-in-inches(x,y)" the particular numbers (sentences) things are related to is different, but some one underlying structure is represented either way (ignoring, for the moment, problems about translation…).
    (Though any treatment in terms of relations to the sentences of any one given language may have unpleasant problems related to the phenomena discussed in Montague's "Syntactic treatments of modality."

    Though I fear this is getting pretty far from the original discussion of Lewis's views!

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  22. Michael Shepanski

    Allen Hazen — I agree: I also recall Quine saying something similar elsewhere, but I can't recall where.

    Thank you for forgiving my name-dropping. (For more on those 1993 conversations, see https://valep.vc.univie.ac.at/virtualarchive/public/Harvard_Houghton_Archive_50K%3EQuine_Collection_50K%3ECorrespondence_Quine_Shepanski_2023-05_78%3EShepanski_Seite_02/a:966660)

    You write: "the choice of English sentences rather than those of some other language is analogous to …"
    and Quine also had an analogy: his remark about the mouse was immediately followed by "It is a little like describing a prehistoric ocean current as clockwise."

    (My current view is that the choice of the ascriber's own language as content language is less arbitrary than either of these analogies suggest, because that choice lets us employ a merely disquotational reference predicate — but yes, I'm straying far off-topic.)

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  23. Frank Jackson

    It wasn’t meant as an objection Allen. It was a comment, one that has prompted a useful discussion.

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  24. Nathan Salmon

    Having known David personally (he and I were departmental colleagues for several years), I have long thought that he no longer really believed (assuming he ever did) his counterpart theory & so-called modal realism (a misnomer if ever there was one) once the errors in his thought were exposed—even as he defended those “views” in OPW. He was FAR too intelligent to buy that hogwash, but I believe he was also far too proud to recant his past major intellectual blunders. I don’t think the OP quote about conservatism captures his actual approach to philosophy, which was decidedly not primarily about seeking truth. He & I clashed heavily at Princeton over our differing approaches to philosophy and philosophical methodology. As my senior colleague (I was untenured at the time), his professional “advice” to me concerning my own obsession with finding truth was, in no uncertain terms, to *stop it* & instead to pursue & to cultivate academic notoriety. (He had done exactly that early in his career with his counterpart theory.) Despite the enormous pressure, I politely but firmly declined. (I recount all this in my unpublished “My Philosophical Education” and even more candidly in “Memoirs of a Misunderstood Truth Seeker”, both accessible from PhilPapers.)

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  25. Brad Wray

    Nathan
    Thank you for this background. I think it provides some important insight into understanding Lewis' work, especially for someone who knows very little about him personally. His positions often seem geared to "academic noteriety". Even his paper authored by Bruce Le Catt seems more concerned with attracting attention than an earnest attempt to get at the truth. His legacy, though, is a crowd of philosophers possessed by his "charm" and philosophical "problems".

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  26. Nathan Salmon

    You’re very welcome, Brad. Some devotees are upset at my recounting some unflattering facts about Lewis. Other readers, like yourself, appreciate the truth, warts & all. The truth raises the question why Lewis so passionately claimed to be what he so patently was not: a consistent warrior for “the positive convictions of common sense”. His counterpart theory added to the injury against common sense the insult of misinterpreting the dictates of modal common sense as semantically containing something altogether different & quite far-fetched. He was of course well aware that in achieving academic notoriety with his counterpart theory, he had also earned an intellectual reputation that was at least somewhat ignominious, if not indeed largely so.

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  27. agermanopinion

    I use the Lewis papers as logic recipes. For me they are presentations of non trivial technical problems and their solutions that often unexpectedly appear by the (partly very esoteric) theories discussed in the respective paper. For me the papers contain isolated (and in contrast to what is often said neither holistic nor systematic) problems, where the technical solution was in most cases generic and extendable.

    I never met David Lewis, but from his writings I often had the impression that he was never particularly married to a particular philosophical view. It always seemend to me that he loved to work out difficult technical problems like a young boy loves to figure out how he can make his steam engine work and share the instructions of how to do that. Insofar I found the Lewis papers always extremely practical and useful.

    But Lewis also always works on – what I would call – the "logical core". This makes the message – for my very personal taste – philosophically uninteresting. You often end up shifting analytical truths from left to right and back. An example: I am also an engineer and 15 years ago we tried to build in his decision theory into reinforcement learning algorithms. This was impossible. From the content point of view it was simply to meager for an empirical application. In contrast to that Williamson's thesis "Kowledge is a Mental State" which is often being considered equally far-fetched as Lewis's modal realism is certainly much more interesting for an empirical application and a very strong concept (like in my opinion his whole work).

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