Part Five. Probability

Author: Lewis, David

Source: Philosophical Papers Volume II, June 1987 , pp. 81-83(3)

Publisher: Oxford Scholarship Online Monographs

Key:

- Free Content

- New Content

- Subscribed Content

- Free Trial Content

Abstract:

A collection of 13 papers by David Lewis, written on a variety of topics including causation, counterfactuals and indicative conditionals, the direction of time, subjective and objective probability, explanation, perception, free will, and rational decision. The conclusions reached include the claim that time travel is possible, that counterfactual dependence is asymmetrical, that events are properties of spatiotemporal regions, that the Prisoners’ Dilemma is a Newcomb problem, and that causation can be analyzed in terms of counterfactual dependence between events. These papers can be seen as a “prolonged campaign” for a philosophical position Lewis calls “Humean supervenience,” according to which “all there is to the world is a vast mosaic of local matters of particular fact,” with all global features of the world thus supervening on the spatiotemporal arrangement of local qualities.

Keywords: Prisoners’ Dilemma; causation; explanation; Humean supervenience; rational decision; time; perception; indicative conditionals; counterfactuals; events; probability; David Lewis; conditionals; free will; metaphysics