W. V. Quine and David Lewis: Structural (Epistemological) Humility

This chapter argues that W. V. Quine and D. K. Lewis, despite their differences and their different receptions, came to a common intellectual destination: epistemological structuralism. The chapter begins by providing an account of Quine’s epistemological structuralism as it came to its mature development in his final works, Pursuit of Truth (1990) and From Stimulus to Science (1995), and the chapter shows how this doctrine developed out of his earlier views on explication and the inscrutability of reference. It then turns to the correspondence between Quine and Lewis which sets the scene for Lewis’s adoption of structuralism vis-à-vis set theory in the Appendix to his Parts of Classes (1990). The chapter concludes, drawing further from Lewis’s correspondence, by arguing that Lewis proceeded from there to embrace in one of his own final papers, ‘Ramseyan Humility’ (2001), an encompassing form of epistemological structuralism, whilst discharging the doctrine of reference magnetism that had hitherto set Lewis apart from Quine.

Ramseyan humility: the response from revelation and panpsychism

David Lewis argues for Ramseyan humility, the thesis that we can’t identify the fundamental properties that occupy the nomological roles at our world. Lewis, however, remarks that there is a potential exception to this, which involves assuming two views concerning qualia (i) panphenomenalism (contemporary panpsychism): all instantiated fundamental properties are qualia and (ii) the identification thesis (revelation): we can know the identities of our qualia simply by being acquainted with them. This paper aims to provide an exposition, as well as an assessment, of this response to the humility thesis.