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Because of these problems, early work such as that of W.V. Quine held that counterfactuals are not strictly logical, and do not make true or false claims about the world. However, in the 1960s and 1970s, work by Robert Stalnaker and David Lewis showed that these problems are surmountable given an appropriate intensional logical
David Kellogg Lewis (September 28, 1941 – October 14, 2001) was an American philosopher. Lewis taught briefly at UCLA and then at Princeton University from 1970 until his death. He is closely associated with Australia , whose philosophical community he visited almost annually for more than 30 years.
At the heart of David Lewis's modal realism are six central doctrines about possible worlds: [3] Possible worlds exist — they are just as real as our world.; Possible worlds are the same sort of things as our world — they differ in content, not in kind.
On the Plurality of Worlds (1986) [1] is a book by the philosopher David Lewis that defends the thesis of modal realism. [2] " The thesis states that the world we are part of is but one of a plurality of worlds," as he writes in the preface, "and that we who inhabit this world are only a few out of all the inhabitants of all the worlds."
Theories of counterfactuals try to determine the conditions under which counterfactuals are true or false. The most well-known approach, due to Robert Stalnaker and David Lewis, proposes to analyze counterfactuals in terms of similarity between possible worlds. [7] [26] A possible world is a way things could have been.
David Lewis famously advocated for a position known as modal realism, which holds that possible worlds are real, concrete places which exist in the exact same sense that the actual world exists. On Lewis's account, the actual world is special only in that we live there.
Nelson Goodman takes up this and related issues in his seminal Fact, Fiction, and Forecast; and David Lewis's influential articulation of possible world theory is popularly applied in efforts to solve it. Physicalist approaches offer alternative solutions to the problem of counterfactuals within a materialist framework.
Counterfactualism, through a vocabulary developed by David K. Lewis and his many worlds theory [6] although popular with philosophers, has had the effect of creating wide disbelief of universals amongst academics. Many difficulties lie in between hypothetical coherence and its effective actualization.