Alexander Pruss's Blog

Suppose that an extremely reliable cannon is loaded with a rock, and pointed at a window, and the extremely reliable timer on the cannon is ...

In an argument that David Lewis’s account of possible worlds leads to inductive skepticism, I used this premise: If knowing that x is F ...

According to the best-systems account of laws (BSA), the fundamental laws of nature are the axioms of the system that are true and optimize ...

According to the probabilistic best-systems account of laws (PBSA), the fundamental laws of nature are the axioms of the system that optimiz...

On Mill-Ramsey-Lewis accounts of laws of nature, the laws are the propositions that best balance informativeness and brevity (in a language ...

Start with the concept of “narrowly physical” for facts about the arrangement of physical entities and first-order physical properties such ...

David Lewis’s 1983 identity theory of mind holds that: For each mental state type M there is a causal role R M such that to be a state ...

David Lewis’s notion of the naturalness of predicates may seem at first sight like just the thing to solve Goodman’s new puzzle of induction...

One problem for functionalism is the problem of defect. David Lewis, for instance, talks of a madman for whom pain is triggered by something...

Here is an interesting problem for Lewis. Lewis says that sets are necessary beings, and hence count as existing in all worlds. Very plausib...

Multiverse theories like David Lewis’s or Donald Turner’s populate reality with a multitude of universes containing strange things like unic...

According to the Lewisian best system analysis of laws, a proposition p is a fundamental law if and only if it is an axiom in the...

According to David Lewis, the fundamental laws of nature are those propositions that collectively optimize a balance of the twin ...

Yesterday, I overheard my six-year-old son Dominic saying in another room "... because the world is not in the world."  In later c...

A serious problem with Lewis's account of counterfactuals is that as Elga and Pruss have shown, Lewis's similarity account licenses ...