Philosophy David Lewis Summary

In everyday conversation, we often do not pay attention to the structure and conversational dynamics. For instance, philosopher David Lewis believes that the structure of a conversation is based on a “conversational scoreboard” and the scoreboard contains several different features that add or subtract to a conversation. Within this scoreboard, features such as presupposition and assertion can capture the relevance of a conversation. In addition, these features have rules that can determine the status of the conversational scoreboard. However, Lewis appears to be vague on his rules. For these rules to encompass all speech acts, it is important to expand upon them. In any type of conversation, there is some information that is presupposed.

David Lewis’ first and third rules appear to make the most sense and leave little room for arguments. However, Lewis’ second rule is where the confusion lies. The first issue with the second rule is how long does Lewis deem it acceptable to reject or not reject a speaker’s utterance that carries the current presupposition into the next context. For example, if two participants are having a conversation, then hours later while the two are continuing their conversation, the listener then rejects the speaker’s utterance with a question. Lewis does not have a response to how long a listener has before their utterance is considered as a rejection. Personally, it would make more sense if Lewis expanded upon this portion of the rule by rephrasing it to something such as, “The rule states that if the conversational partner does not reject an utterance shortly after the utterance was made, then the presupposition gets added to the next context”. The next issue with the second rule is that the rule is vague on what the limitations of what can be said. For example, it does not reference relevancy. Therefore, if the listener responds to the speaker’s utterance about baseball with “dogs are my favorite animal”, Lewis does not have an answer as to how this fits into his second rule. A way to reconcile this is to specify that the listener’s utterance must be

However, the further one continues to read Lewis’ rules, the more one may become puzzled because of the vagueness that is included with his rules. It is necessary that Lewis’ rules are expanded because there needs to be rules which govern how questions can be asked. In other words, Lewis does not have an answer as to how he believes a question can be asked during a conversation and how asking a question affects the conversational score. Since Lewis does not respond to all these concerns, then it is important that the rules are revised that include all of the different types of speech acts and eliminates the vagueness that is included in the rules. Once this is done, then one can fully understand how David Lewis’ believes a presupposition is guided through a