Speaker Series: Barry Loewer (Rutgers University) Title: Bringing Lewis Back to Quine

Abstract:  While both Quine and Lewis were what we call “naturalists”, they differed in their treatment of naturalness and natural kinds. For Quine “natural” is an honorific earned by a predicate or a kind in virtue of its role in a scientific law or theory. Lewis understands “natural” differently. For him being natural is a property of properties and is metaphysically fundamental, not analyzable in terms of or reducible to anything else. His view is that every set of possible entities is a property but only a select few of these sets are perfectly natural. Lewis constructed his Human metaphysics of laws, chances, causation, and counterfactuals on the basis of perfectly natural properties. Hilary Putnam called Lewis's perfectly natural properties "spooky". I agree. In this paper I develop an account of nomological modalities I call "the Package Deal Account" (PDA) based on Quine's epistemology of science that preserves much of Lewis' metaphysical accounts of laws, chances, causation and counterfactuals but without perfectly natural properties. This brings Lewis back to Quine.

Speaker Biography

Barry Loewer is a Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University. His education is as follows: PhD Stanford 1975, and BA Amherst College 1965. Loewer’s recent book is called “Laws and Chances: What Breathes Fire into the Equations”. He has published widely on laws, counterfactuals, probability, foundation of quantum mechanics and statistical mechanics, philosophy of mind, modal logic.