| Phi 346-02 Spring 2014 |
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David Lewis (1941-2001) was another philosopher of the same generation as the last several we’ve discussed. Although he sometimes set off in his own direction—his way of handling issues associated with quantifying-in was quite different from Kripke and Kaplan—here he works to draw together ideas from others with some of his own; in doing so, he connects Stalnaker’s idea of pragmatic presupposition to a variety of other phenomena. This article has an unusual structure: two introductory examples are followed by a general discussion divided into three sections, which is followed in turn by six further examples. Your assignment for Wed. consists of the first five of these eleven sections, and we’ll discuss the final group of examples on Fri.
• You’ve seen Stalnaker discuss the function of presupposition in “Pragmatics,” but he didn’t there say much about the way presuppositions change. That is Lewis’ main concern and the idea of “accommodation” that he introduces at the end of Example 1 is the key idea of the article.
• Lewis’ discussion of permissability employs an abstract description of the simple situation that you imagine being part of a children’s “language game” analogous to the game “Simon Says” (which concerns commands). The example also illustrates some common features of speech acts: statements of permissability are acceptable only when made by the “master” and these statements affect the social relation between the two players. That is, the rules governing language are tied to rules of a social institution.
• The next three sections use the example of baseball to introduce Lewis’ conception of a score, apply this conception to language, and use this application to provide a general characterization of accommodation. Apart from the abstraction, the discussion is pretty straightforward.
Along the way, Lewis touches on some important ideas that have applications broader than even his broad description of language games. The distinction between “constitutive” and “regulative” rules (p. 343) draws on a distinction made by Kant in a somewhat different context to distinguish rules which serve to create (and in that sense “constitute”) special sorts of action and associated ideas (e.g., the ideas of a strike or a home run) from rules which require or limit the performance of certain actions.
Lewis’ reference to “operationalism” and “legal realism” (p. 344) makes an allusion to Pragmatism. The view of law usually labeled by the second term (though not the term itself) is due to the American jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. (1841-1935), who knew the Pragmatists C. S. Peirce and William James from his college years. Legal Realism is sometimes expressed in the slogan “The law is what the courts decide.” The first term refers to the notion of “operational definitions” introduced by the physicist P. W. Bridgman (1882-1961), who grew up at a time when and at a place (Cambridge, MA) where the Pragmatist movement was flourishing. You can seen Quine’s discussion of “radical translation” as an effort to look for an operational definition of meaning, so Lewis’ comments about these ideas offers some hints about how Quine might respond to Lewis’ discussion of conversational score.