Date of Graduation
8-2016
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Arts in Philosophy (MA)
Degree Level
Graduate
Department
Philosophy
Advisor/Mentor
Eric Funkhouser
Committee Member
Jack Lyons
Second Committee Member
Barry Ward
Keywords
Philosophy, religion and theology, Lewis, David, Metaphysics, Natural properties, Naturalness, Philosophy of language, Reference magnetism
Abstract
Some ways of talking or thinking about the world are better than others. Most obviously, it is often better to say or believe true things rather than false things. Perhaps less obvious is the notion that our speech and thought ought to, or often in fact does, reflect the natural formation or structure of the world. This idea—that we ought to be carving the world at its natural joints—can be found at least as far back as Plato’s Phaedrus. More recently, we can see a related idea in the work of David Lewis. In “New Work for a Theory of Universals,” Lewis argued that there is a special set of properties—the natural properties—that carve the world at its joints. In Lewis’s sense, the notion of a natural property is a complex one: it plays a number of conceptual and explanatory roles. In this thesis, I first detail some important background on properties in general. I then shift my focus to Lewis’s natural properties and the various roles he had in mind for them. In doing so, I pay particularly close attention to the supposed connection between natural properties and the metasemantic notion of reference magnetism. I consider the question of whether there exists a unique set of properties that can play all of Lewis’s roles. I argue that there is no such set. I then conclude by arguing that there are good reasons to deny that there are natural properties in the Lewisian sense.
Citation
Abney, D. (2016). Contra Lewisian Naturalness. Graduate Theses and Dissertations Retrieved from https://scholarworks.uark.edu/etd/1736