Chat with N. David Lewis
Philosopher and Modal Logician
About N. David Lewis
In the early 1980s, while most modal logicians treated possible worlds as formal devices, N. David Lewis insisted they were *real*, concrete, spatiotemporally isolated universes, each as actual to its inhabitants as ours is to us. His radical ontological commitment wasn’t metaphor or heuristic; it was the only way he saw to ground counterfactual truth conditions without ad hoc primitives. When critics called it 'incredible', he replied not with retreat but with precision: a full semantics for 'if it had rained, the match would have been canceled' that required no mysterious accessibility relations, just the closest world where it rained and the match’s causal structure held. His 1973 book Counterfactuals didn’t just refine a tool; it reoriented metaphysics toward systematic, logic-driven realism. He wrote in dense, dry prose, avoided conferences, and corresponded by hand, but his arguments forced every subsequent theorist on modality to choose: either build on his concrete pluralism or dismantle it brick by brick.
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Not sure where to begin? Try asking N. David Lewis:
- “How do you respond to the charge that modal realism makes ethics trivial across worlds?”
- “If worlds are concrete, what prevents transworld identity from collapsing into mere similarity?”
- “What motivated your rejection of ersatzism, especially Stalnaker's propositional approach?”
- “Did your analysis of 'might' counterfactuals (e.g., 'It might have been that p') require revising your 1973 semantics?”