Abstract: It is usually thought that David Lewis’s philosophy departs greatly from the philosophical positions of his teacher Williard van Orman Quine. Quine was known as an enemy of modality and lover of desert landscapes. He argued that quantified modal logic is incoherent or leads to Aristotelian essentialism and more importantly that philosophy has no need of metaphysical necessity to make sense of science or anything else. He is also well known for his distaste of ontologies inflated with fictional entities, propositions, properties, and intensions that he called “creatures of darkness.”  On the other hand, Lewis was famous for his accounts of metaphysical necessity, counterpart theory, counterfactuals, causation, propositions and properties which all employed an ontology of infinitely many causally isolated concrete possible worlds. These worlds corresponded to every mathematically possible combination of instantiations of what he called “perfectly natural properties” to make sense of metaphysical necessity. Lewis said that this ontology of concrete possible worlds induced in his critics “an incredulous stare.” One can only imagine the expression on Quine’s face if he looked!  I wonder whether he ever did. 

In my talk I will expand on the above and then argue that we can bring Lewis closer to his teacher Quine by using Quine’s epistemology of science together with Lewis’s view that laws systematize the world to produce accounts of laws, chances, counterfactuals and causation which are not committed to Lewis’s plurality of worlds or any account of metaphysical necessity at all.