The normativity of Lewis Conventions

David Lewis famously proposed to model conventions as solutions to coordination games, where equilibrium selection is driven by precedence, or the history of play. A characteristic feature of Lewis Conventions is that they are intrinsically non-normative. Some philosophers have argued that for this reason they miss a crucial aspect of our folk notion of convention. It is doubtful however that Lewis was merely analysing a folk concept. I illustrate how his theory can (and must) be assessed using empirical data, and argue that it does indeed miss an important aspect of real-world conventions.     

Parts, classes and Parts of Classes: an anti-realist reading of Lewisian mereology

This study is in two parts. In the first part, various important principles of classical extensional mereology are derived on the basis of a nice axiomatization involving ‘part of’ and fusion. All results are proved here with full Fregean (and Gentzenian) rigor. They are chosen because they are needed for the second part. In the second part, this natural-deduction framework is used in order to regiment David Lewis’s justification of his Division Thesis, which features prominently in his combination of mereology with class theory. The Division Thesis plays a crucial role in Lewis’s informal argument for his Second Thesis in his book Parts of Classes. In order to present Lewis’s argument in rigorous detail, an elegant new principle is offered for the theory that combines class theory and mereology. The new principle is called the Canonical Decomposition Thesis. It secures Lewis’s Division Thesis on the strong construal required in order for his argument to go through. The exercise illustrates how careful one has to be when setting up the details of an adequate foundational theory of parts and classes. The main aim behind this investigation is to determine whether an anti-realist, inferentialist theorist of meaning has the resources to exhibit Lewis’s argument for his Second Thesis—which is central to his marriage of class theory with mereology—as a purely conceptual one. The formal analysis shows that Lewis’s argument, despite its striking appearance to the contrary, can be given in the constructive, relevant logic IR. This is the logic that the author has argued, elsewhere, to be the correct logic from an anti-realist point of view. The anti-realist is therefore in a position to regard Lewis’s argument as purely conceptual.     

Lewis,Change and Temporary Intrinsics

This is an attempt to sort out what is it that makes many of us uncomfortable with the perdurantist solution to the problem of change. Lewis argues that only perdurantism can reconcile change with persistence over time, while neither presentism nor endurantism can. So, first, I defend the endurantist solution to the problem of change, by arguing that what is relative to time are not properties, but their possession. Second, I explore the anti-perdurantist strategy of arguing that Lewis cannot solve the problem of change, for he cannot account for how some properties are possessed by objects in time. However, I argue that this strategy fails, for if by saying that objects in time can have properties ‘timelessly’ we mean “at no particular time” and “tenselessly”, only objects outside time can have properties in that way; but if we mean “for all the time they exist”, or “essentially”, perdurantists can account for this. Finally, I argue that actually perdurantism cannot solve the problem, but for different reasons: for either it sweeps the problem under the carpet, denying change, and in general subverting our conceptual scheme in a dangerous way, or it becomes equivalent to the endurantist picture that properties are had at times. Nor perdurantism is justified by the Relativity Theory or the B-theory of time, because while endurantism is certainly comfortable with presentism, it need not be committed to it; and even if it were, presentism need not be refuted by the Relativity Theory.     

C. I. Lewis,Kant, and the reflective method of philosophy

ABSTRACT

If it seems unquestionable that C. I. Lewis is a Kantian in important respects, it is more difficult to determine what, if anything, is original about his Kantianism. For it might be argued that Lewis’ Kantianism simply reflects an approach to the a priori which was very common in the first half of the twentieth century, namely, the effort to make the a priori relative. In this paper, I will argue that Lewis’ Kantianism does present original features. The latter can be detected by focusing on Lewis’ account of the method of philosophy in the first chapter of Mind and the World Order. In that context, Lewis argues that the method of philosophy should be reflective and critical. It will be my contention that this understanding of philosophy involves a therapeutic perspective, which bears important resemblances to Kant’s account of transcendental reflection in the Amphiboly of the Critique of Pure Reason. I will illustrate how this therapeutic application of reflection works in Lewis’ metaphysics. In this context, reflection can correct errors of reasoning that occur when we are operating within a particular conceptual scheme and use the criteria of reality that are appropriate in another.     

Conventions and Moral Norms: The Legacy of Lewis

David Lewis’ Convention has been a major source of inspiration for philosophers and social scientists alike for the analysis of norms. In this essay, I demonstrate its usefulness for the analysis of some moral norms. At the same time, conventionalism with regards to moral norms has attracted sustained criticism. I discuss three major strands of criticism and propose how these can be met. First, I discuss the criticism that Lewis conventions analyze norms in situations with no conflict of interest, whereas most, if not all, moral norms deal with situations with conflicting interests. This criticism can be answered by showing that conventions can emerge in those contexts as well. Secondly, I discuss the objection that this type of conventionalism, inspired by Lewis, presents moral norms as fundamentally contingent, whereas most, if not all, moral norms are not. However, such critics fail to appreciate that conventions are not radically contingent. Moreover, if one distinguishes the question as to why an individual should comply with a norm from the question whether the norm in question itself can be justified, a core element of the complaint of contingency disappears. The third objection to conventionalism concerns the way in which conventionalists justify norms. I argue that reflection upon the way in which according to Lewis norms are justified reveals a fundamental tension in his theory. Possible solutions to this tension all have in common that the complaint of contingency returns in some form. Therefore, this third complaint cannot be avoided altogether.     

Sartre and Spinoza on the nature of mind

What surfaces first when one examines the philosophy of mind of Sartre and Spinoza are the differences between them. For Spinoza a human mind is a mode of the divine mind. That view is a far cry from Sartre’s view of human consciousness as a desire never achieved: the desire to be god, to be the foundation of one’s own existence. How could two philosophers, one a determinist and the other who grounds human freedom in the nature of consciousness itself, be seen as having any commonalities worth exploring? How could the noted user of the deductive method and one of the most important phenomenologists of the twentieth century share any philosophical ground at all? I will argue in this paper that despite the very real differences between their two philosophies, there are striking similarities between Sartre’s view of consciousness and Spinoza’s view of the mind. They become apparent when one examines each one’s analysis of the nature of mind and its relationship to itself, the body, and the world. Both are heir to a kind of Aristotelian naturalism. This commonality between them derives from their mutual rejection of Descartes’ substance dualism. I first explore the consequences of that rejection on how each one conceives of the relationship between the mind and its objects. Next I examine their view of the mind’s relation to itself and finally I look at how each one understood the mind’s relationship to the body and the world. The examination of their two views reveals how much they anticipate and support theories of mind defended by contemporary analytic philosophers of mind.     

Lewis,Wilson, Hume: A Response to Jessica Wilson on Lewisian Plenitude and Hume’s Dictum

According to David Lewis’s Modal Realism, other possible worlds really exist as concrete, spatiotemporal systems, and every way that a world could be is a way that some world is. To establish this plenitude of concrete possible worlds, Lewis presents his ‘principle of recombination,’ which is meant to guarantee that there exists a possible world, or part of a possible world, for every possibility. Jessica Wilson has recently argued that Lewis’s principle of recombination fails to generate enough worlds to account for the plenitude of possibilities. Namely, Wilson argues that the principle of recombination cannot account for the possibility of spatially overlapping but distinct fundamental entities, as well as certain macroscopic entities. In this paper, I will defend Lewis’s principle of recombination against these charges, arguing that Wilson’s objections overlook features of Lewisian metaphysics that can solve the problems at hand.     

Epistemicism,Distribution, and the Argument from Vagueness

This paper consists of two parts. The first concerns the logic of vagueness. The second concerns a prominent debate in metaphysics. One of the most widely accepted principles governing the ‘definitely’ operator is the principle of Distribution: if ‘p’ and ‘if p then q’ are both definite, then so is ‘q’. I argue however, that epistemicists about vagueness (at least those who take a broadly Williamsonian line) should reject this principle. The discussion also helps to shed light on the elusive question of what, on this framework, it takes for a sentence to be borderline or definite. In the second part of the paper, I apply this result to a prominent debate in metaphysics. One of the most influential arguments in favour of Universalism about composition is the Lewis‐Sider argument from vagueness. An interesting question, however, is whether epistemicists have any particular reasons to resist the argument. I show that there is no obvious reason why epistemicists should resist the argument but there is a non‐obvious one: the rejection of Distribution argued for in the first part of the paper provides epistemicists with a unique way of resisting the argument from vagueness.     

Using Personal Landmark Events Improves Judgments about Time,but not Contents,in Autobiographical Memory

Landmark events are strong memories that function as reference points for other memories. We examined whether people's accuracy in recalling when an earlier target event occurred was related to whether they spontaneously used personal landmark events or not. Participants completed two questionnaires separated by 2‐31 days. In the first, they described a personal event including what happened, who was there, where it was, and when it occurred. In the second questionnaire, they recalled the personal event and specific details. They also described whether they had used landmark events to assist their recall. Overall, participants' memories for temporal and content information faded over time. Spontaneous use of landmark events was associated with an increase in participants’ recall of temporal information but not content information. Analysis of the landmark events revealed that almost two‐thirds were significant events, such as birthdays, parties, and travel‐related events. Applications of the findings are discussed. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Review of Evnine,Simon J., Epistemic Dimensions of Personhood,New York: Oxford University Press, 2008, pp. viii + 176, £32.50 (cloth)

The different occurrences of a word in a sentence cannot be identified with the one word type, nor with its many tokens. What then are occurrences of a word? How can one type occur more than once in another type? Is the conception of ‘structural universals’ that leads to these questions incoherent, as Lewis maintained? I argue against the answer Wetzel suggested, which identifies sentences with functions from numbers to expressions, and propose instead that occurrences of one type in another are subtypes with different relative positions in the whole. Types have subtypes as well as tokens. Occurrences in non-symmetrical types like sequences are individuated by their relative positions in the type. Occurrences in a symmetrical whole have different positions but stand in the same relations to the other components. They are numerically different subtypes that do not differ from each other qualitatively.     

The frustrating problem for four-dimensionalism

I argue that four-dimensionalism and the desire satisfaction account of well-being are incompatible. For every person whose desires are satisfied, there will be many shorter-lived individuals (‘person-stages’ or ‘subpersons’) who share the person’s desires but who do not exist long enough to see those desires satisfied; not only this, but in many cases their desires are frustrated so that the desires of the beings in whom they are embedded as proper temporal parts may be fulfilledI call this the frustrating problem for four-dimensionalism. In the first half of the paper I lay the groundwork for understanding the frustrating problem, and then in the second half, I will examine six possible responses to the frustrating problem on behalf of the four-dimensionalist, (i) the Parfit (1984) inspired claim that identity is not what matters, (ii) the personal pronoun revisionism of Noonan (Analysis 70(1):93–98, 2010), (iii) the indirect concern account of Hudson (A materialist metaphysics of the human person, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 2001), (iv) the sensible stages account of Lewis (On the plurality of worlds, Wiley Blackwell Press, Oxford, 1986), (v) a multiple-concepts account of desire satisfaction, and (vi) a No Desire View according to which subpersons have no mental states and thus no desires to frustrate. I argue that none of these solutions will help the four-dimensionalist; she does better to reject the desire satisfaction theory, while the defender of the desire satisfaction theory does better to reject four-dimensionalism.     

Classical Game Theory, Socialization and the Rationalization of Conventions

The paper begins by providing a game-theoretic reconstruction of Gilbert’s (1989) philosophical critique of Lewis (1969) on the role of salience in selecting conventions. Gilbert’s insight is reformulated thus: Nash equilibrium is insufficiently powerful as a solution concept to rationalize conventions for unboundedly rational agents if conventions are solutions to the kinds of games Lewis supposes. Both refinements to NE and appeals to bounded rationality can plug this gap, but lack generality. As Binmore (this issue) argues, evolutive game theory readily explains the origin of conventional behavior, but that is not Lewis’s project. Gilbert’s critique is generalized by reference to Bacharach’s (2006) work on team reasoning in games. The paper then argues that although Lewis’s account of the rationalization of conventions is shown by the reconstruction of Gilbert’s critique to be incomplete, Gilbert is wrong to conclude that classical (‘eductive’) game theory lacks the resources to explain conformity to conventions among people. A game-theoretic account of the dynamics of socialization, based on Ross’s (2005, 2006) idea of ‘game determination’, rationalizes choices of conventional strategies in overlapping generations contexts, provided agents are products of evolutionary selection and know that other players are also such products.     

Conditioned Inhibition in a Multiple Category Learning Task

Four experiments investigated inhibition that might arise in a task in which cues are associated with more than one outcome. In each experiment, human subjects played a game called 'Clues and Culprits' in which they were asked to judge the predictive strength of clues that had been associated with culprits in a series of hypothetical crimes. In a two-outcome version of the familiar conditioned inhibition paradigm (A+, AX- ), one clue was paired with one culprit on its own, but it was paired with a second culprit when it was combined with a second clue (A-1, AX-2). According to the delta rule, X should acquire inhibition for the first culprit; it should also acquire more inhibition than a differential cue merely associated with a second culprit (e.g. A-1, X-2). Inhibition was found with both procedures. However, the amount of inhibition did not differ between them, suggesting that mere association with a second outcome was sufficient to inhibit performance based on the first. Other data suggested the presence of cue competition. Also, when a cue associated with one culprit was paired with a second culprit on other trials, there was little evidence of unlearning of the first association.     

Redefining ‘Intrinsic’*

Several alleged counterexamples to the definition of ‘intrinsic’ proposed in Rae Langton and David Lewis,‘Defining “Intrinsic”’, are unconvincing. Yet there are reasons for dissatisfaction, and room for improvement. One desirable change is to raise the standard of non‐disjunctiveness, thereby putting less burden on contentious judgements of comparative naturalness. A second is to deal with spurious independence by throwing out just the disjunctive troublemakers, instead of throwing out disjunctive properties wholesale, and afterward reinstating those impeccably intrinsic disjunctive properties that are not troublemakers. (The second of these changes makes the first more affordable.) A third, suggested by Brian Weatherson, would be to invoke the general principle that the intrinsic and the extrinsic characters of things are independent, rather than relying just on one special case of this principle; but it is none too obvious how to do this.     

儿童内疚情绪对其亲社会行为的影响

为考察儿童内疚情绪对其亲社会行为的影响,本研究采用现场实验的方法探讨了小学5年级学生内疚情绪与其亲社会行为的关系。结果显示：（1）内疚情绪能促进儿童亲社会行为水平的提高,难过情绪不能促进儿童亲社会行为水平的提高;（2）当儿童将注意力集中于自己对团体造成的不良影响,产生内疚情绪,但如果其将注意力集中于自己的不良结果时,则产生难过情绪。结论：儿童的消极情绪是否能促进其亲社会行为水平的提高,取决于其将注意力集中于自己还是他人。     

反思自我评价的性质

反思自我评价是指个体对于他人如何看待自己的知觉;它对自我概念、种族认同的形成起着重要作用。反思自我评价并不完全准确,它受熟悉性,自尊水平等多种因素的影响。关于反思自我评价的形成,目前主要有三种理论：直接观察模型、他人反馈模型和自我理论模型。由于中西方在文化、社会和历史背景上的不同,应加强建构适合我国文化背景的反思自我评价理论;另外,也应加强对反思自我评价研究的应用探讨。     

Ramseyan Humility, scepticism and grasp

In ‘Ramseyan Humility’ David Lewis argues that a particular view about fundamental properties, quidditism, leads to the position that we are irredeemably ignorant of the identities of fundamental properties. We are ignorant of the identities of fundamental properties since we can never know which properties play which causal roles, and we have no other way of identifying fundamental properties other than by the causal roles they play. It has been suggested in the philosophical literature that Lewis’ argument for Humility is merely an instance of traditional scepticism, to which traditional responses to scepticism are applicable. I agree that in ‘Ramseyan Humility’ Lewis does present an argument to which it is appropriate to consider the applicability of responses to traditional scepticism—he argues that we irredeemably lack the evidence to rule out possibilities in which different properties occupy the causal roles described by our best physical theory. And prima facie this is just the kind of argument responses to traditional scepticism are designed to tackle. However, I will argue that Lewis bolsters this argument with a second. This second argument serves to deepen Lewis’ case and cannot be met with a response to traditional scepticism. For Lewis argues that not only do we lack evidence for which properties play which roles, we lack the ability to grasp any such proposition about role-occupancy. And if we cannot grasp any such proposition we cannot know it.     

There Is No Bathing in River Styx: Rule Manipulation,Performance Downplaying and Adversarial Schemes

Adversarial scheme points to situations of rivalry like auctions, public tendering, sports competitions, elections or trials. Thomas Pogge suggested that these schemes have great advantage: they force agents to reveal their full performance. But they also incentivize agents to manipulate the rules. In other schemes with incentives, he also suggests, agents can easily downplay their performance, but won’t engage in rule manipulation to the same extent. In this paper, I will argue that adversarial schemes and other schemes with incentives advantages or disadvantages do not map from one to the other as Pogge suggests. Performance-downplaying also takes place in adversarial schemes, as well as in other schemes with incentives also lead to rule manipulation. I will also argue that there are genuine differences between these two types of schemes. Adversarial schemes have three unique advantages: first, they may be more effective in producing motivational improvements at a lower cost, second, they may lead to an automatic optimization of performances and, third, they may produce unique system benefits. In order to produce these advantages, we must design adversarial schemes properly and use them in the right situation.