Bringing Quine and Lewis Back Together

Speaker: Barry Loewer (Rutgers)

This talk examines connections between Quine’s epistemology of science and Lewis’ metaphysics of science and their different conceptions of naturalness. I develop a metaphysical account of nomological modalities and fundamental properties Lewisian in spirit but dispensing with his possible worlds and his version of naturalness in favor of probabilities and a Quinean notion of naturalness. This account, called “the Package Deal Account of laws and chances” (PDA), is constructed out of Quine’s epistemology of science. The result is an account of the metaphysics of laws and other nomological modalities that combines features of Quines’ epistemology and Lewis’ physics and brings their views closer together.