The Quinean Roots of Lewis’s Humeanism

Abstract

INTRODUCTION: QUINE AND HIS STUDENT LEWIS FROM A HISTORICAL POINT OF VIEWMetaphysical enquiry into the existence and nature of things, pronounced dead midcentury by logical positivists, late Wittgensteinians, ordinary-language philosophers, and pragmatists, took centre stage again at the end of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first century. Champions of metaphysics consider its victory complete, holding up David Lewis (1941-2001) as their hero. His pluriverse of possible worlds, they say, made metaphysics respectable once again. But antimetaphysicians, inspired by W.V. Quine's (1908-2000) pragmatist scruples about heavy-duty metaphysics, proclaim with equal confidence that metaphysics has no legitimacy. All of this is peculiar when we consider the two philosophers' personal and intellectual history. Quine was Lewis's teacher, and there was much common ground between them. Both were empiricists, physicalists, Humeans, lovers of ontological desert landscapes who made efforts to explain away or reduce abstruse posits naturalistically.Increased historical awareness of twentieth-century developments would reveal the true import of Quine's and Lewis's work, and so help overcome such pervasive misunderstandings between metaphysicians and antimetaphysicians. To bring about a historically self-aware metaphysics we must extend the boundaries of the history of analytic philosophy to include the mid-to-late twentieth century. Analytic philosophy's early beginnings, its revolutionary overthrow of idealism and bold investigation of how language maps onto an external world, have been subjected to close historical scrutiny. Now, in the twenty-first century, we can investigate its development between 1945 and 2000 with the benefit of hindsight, too. But an even more compelling reason to develop this new subfield, the recent history of analytic philosophy, is because we twenty-first-century philosophers need it to remove misconceptions about our intellectual heritage. Quine in particular is a sadly misunderstood figure, despite his stature. His intellectual relationship with his unabashedly metaphysical disciple Lewis is an especially illustrative case in point. My overarching project is to set the record straight about Quine's role in metaphysics' rumoured demise, and its improbable rise from its ashes, between the mid- and late twentieth century. I argue, was not an antimetaphysician or flat-footed deflationist, but an interesting, empiricist metaphysician, striving to fit metaphysics around scientific discovery (Janssen-Lauret 2015; Janssen-Lauret 2016; MacBride and Janssen-Lauret 2015.) In the service of that larger project, this paper teases out one strain of unacknowledged Quinean influence on Lewis: his Humeanism.First I will briefly rehearse the case that Quine always was a metaphysician. Quine's views developed over time, but a preference for a modest, empirically-based kind of metaphysics is a constant presence throughout his early, middle, and late periods. His empiricism and pragmatism led him to deny the legitimacy of Aristotelian and a priori metaphysics. These he viewed as ontologically extravagant, indefensible additions to the frugal physicalism he favoured. Still, to embrace a frugal, physicalist ontology is to endorse a metaphysical point of view. Secondly, I will present historical evidence, based on a combination of published works and never-before-seen unpublished papers and correspondence, which suggests that Lewis's Humean metaphysics derives, not from his reading Hume, but most likely from Quine. Thirdly, I will show that Lewis's mature, Humean counterpart theory, too, has thoroughly Quinean underpinnings.W.V. QUINE: EMPIRICIST METAPHYSICIAN Antimetaphysical pragmatists and inferentialists denounce metaphysical discourse as empty. It derives, they say, from mistaking merely useful or conventional features of our discourse for profound truth about reality. Some prominent antimetaphysicians of this stripe claim Quine as one of their own: Quine, too, is really a deflationist about ontological issues (Price 2009, 325). …