David Kellogg Lewis
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| Western Philosophy 20th-century philosophy |
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| Name: | David Kellogg Lewis |
| Birth: | September 28, 1941 (Oberlin, Ohio) |
| Death: | October 14, 2001 (Princeton, New Jersey) |
| School/tradition: | Analytic |
| Main interests: | Logic, language, metaphysics, epistemology, ethics |
| Notable ideas: | Possible worlds, modal realism |
| Influences: | Leibniz, Hume, Carnap, Ryle, Quine, Strawson |
David Kellogg Lewis (September 28, 1941 – October 14, 2001) is considered to have been one of the leading analytic philosophers of the latter half of the 20th century. Lewis taught at UCLA and then Princeton for much of his career but is also closely associated with Australia, whose philosophical community he visited almost annually for more than thirty years. He is most famous for his theory of modal realism but also made ground-breaking contributions in philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, general metaphysics, epistemology, and philosophical logic.
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[edit] Early Life and Education
Lewis was born in Oberlin, Ohio, to a Professor of Government at Oberlin College and a distinguished medieval historian. He was known later in life for his formidable intellect; this intelligence was already manifest during his years at Oberlin High School, when he attended college lectures in chemistry. He went on to Swarthmore College, and spent a year at Oxford (1959-1960), where he was tutored by Iris Murdoch and attended lectures by Gilbert Ryle, H.P. Grice, P.F. Strawson, and J.L. Austin. It was his year at Oxford that played a seminal role in his decision to study philosophy, and which made him the quintessentially analytic philosopher that he would soon become. Lewis went on to receive his Ph.D from Harvard in 1967, where he studied under W.V.O. Quine, many of whose views he came to repudiate. It was there that his connection with Australia was first established when he took a seminar with J.J.C. Smart, a leading Australian philosopher. "I taught David Lewis," Smart would say in later years, "Or rather, he taught me."
[edit] Early Work on Convention
Lewis's first important work was Convention: A Philosophical Study (1969), which used concepts of game theory to analyze the nature of social conventions. Lewis claimed that social conventions, such as the convention in most states that one is driving to the right (not to 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'". Co-ordination problems were at the time of Lewis's book a much under-discussed kind of game-theoretical problem; most of the game-theoretical discussion had circulated around problems where the participants are in conflict, such as the prisoner's dilemma.
Now co-ordination problems are problematic, for, though the participants have common interests, there are several solutions. Sometimes, one of the solutions may be "'salient'" a concept invented by the game-theorist Thomas Schelling (by whom Lewis was much inspired). For example, a co-ordination problem that have the form of a meeting may have a salient solution if there is only one possible spot to meet at in town. But in most cases, we must rely on what Lewis calls "precedent" in order to get a salient solution. If both participants know that a particular co-ordination problem, say "which side should we drive on?" has been solved in the same way numerous times before, both know that both know this, both know that both know that both know this, etc. (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. That they have solved the problem successfully will be seen by even more people, and thus the convention will spread in society. A convention is thus a behavioural regularity that sustains itself because it serves the interests of everyone involved. Another important feature of a convention is that a convention could be entirely different: we could just as well drive to the left; it is more or less arbitrary that we drive to the right (in America).
Lewis primary aim with his book was, however, even greater than this (he had quite high aims; think that he was only 28 when Convention was published): namely to counter Quine's claim that language is "ruled by convention" (which Quine had claimed in his 1936 article "Truth by convention"). Thus he claimed that linguistic conventions are just a special case of social conventions. It is not clear, however, that it can be shown that this is the case. Lewis's description of linguistic conventions in Convention and a later article ("Languages and Language", 1975) is rather sketchy. For an ingeniuous critique of Lewis's conception of linguistic conventions, and an alternative account of conventions, see Schiffer, S. Meaning. Schiffer makes a forceful argument for the case that conventions of meeting, etc., are actually entirely different from linguistic conventions.
[edit] Work on Counterfactuals
Lewis then went on with Counterfactuals (1973), which astonished the philosophical world with a ground-breaking analysis of counterfactual conditionals in terms of the theory of possible worlds; and On the Plurality of Worlds (1986), which fleshed out and defended the theory of modal realism (a label that he was by then regretting, but with which his theory was stuck) which he had advanced in Counterfactuals. His final monograph, Parts of Classes (1991) sketches a reduction of set theory to mereology. He also published five volumes of collected papers covering a remarkably wide range of topics.
At Princeton, Lewis was a gifted mentor of young philosophers, and trained dozens of successful figures in the field, including several current Princeton faculty, as well as faculty now teaching at most of the leading programs in the U.S.
[edit] Later Life and Death
Lewis suffered from severe diabetes for much of his life, which eventually grew worse and led into kidney failure. In July of 2000 he received a kidney transplant from his wife Stephanie. The transplant allowed him to work and travel for another year, before he died suddenly and unexpectedly from further complications of his diabetes, on 14 October 2001.
