Papers in Philosophical Logic

Lewis's 1998 collection — counterfactuals, modal logic, conditional probability

Tradition: Analytic metaphysics / philosophical logic / philosophy of language

Lewis's 1998 collection — counterfactuals, modal logic, conditional probability, two-dimensional semantics

Published by Cambridge University Press in 1998, 'Papers in Philosophical Logic' is Volume One of David Lewis's Collected Papers and gathers his work on philosophical logic, counterfactuals, modal logic, conditionals, and probability. Major papers include: 'Counterfactual Dependence and Time's Arrow' (1979, applying his counterfactual analysis of causation to the asymmetry of time; the principal source of contemporary asymmetry-of-time literature); 'Probabilities of Conditionals and Conditional Probabilities' (1976, the 'triviality result' showing that the probability of an indicative conditional cannot generally equal the conditional probability of its consequent given its antecedent — a result that fundamentally constrained subsequent philosophy of conditionals); 'Adverbs of Quantification' (1975, foundational for natural-language quantification); 'General Semantics' (1970, the Montague-influenced compositional-semantic programme); 'Counterpart Theory and Quantified Modal Logic' (1968, the original statement of counterpart theory, refined in subsequent papers); 'Truth in Fiction' (1978, on the logic of fictional statements); and 'New Work for a Theory of Universals' (1983, also reprinted in Vol. II). The volume covers the philosophical-logical foundations of much of Lewis's broader metaphysical work; for many readers it is the technical companion to his more philosophically expansive Counterfactuals (1973) and On the Plurality of Worlds (1986).