Organon F
Volume 33, May 2026, Issue 2, Pages 218–237
ISSN 2585-7150 (online)
Research Article
Lewis and the Price of Time Travel: Lessons from Großvater
Huw Price
Responding to Lewis’s (1976) defense of the consistency of time travel (TT), Horwich (1987) and Price (1996) claim that TT may nevertheless be shown to be improbable, due to its need for unlikely coincidences. Smith (1997, 2024) and Ismael (2003) reply, correctly, that this begs the question against TT. Where does this leave us, and TT itself? To put the issue in a broader frame, I note (i) a Lewis-inspired “defense” of Aristotelian mechanics against a famous argument by Galileo; and (ii) the relevance of the Duhem-Quine Thesis. With a range of comparison cases thus in view, TT may be assessed by the Quinean pragmatic standards for theory choice that Lewis elsewhere endorses. I conclude that it is not unreasonable to conclude that TT is highly implausible, despite the fallacy of a direct appeal to the unlikelihood of coincidences. By Lewis’s own standards, treating Quinean pragmatic virtue as a guide to truth, this amounts to an argument for the epistemic improbability of TT.
David Lewis; time travel; causal loops; bilking.
Author
Huw Price
Affiliation
Trinity College, University of Cambridge
Address
Trinity College, University of Cambridge, CB2 1 TQ, UK
Received
13 October 2025
Accepted
29 March 2026
Publishers
Institute of Philosophy of the Slovak Academy of Sciences
Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of Sciences
APA
Price, H. (2026). Lewis and the Price of Time Travel: Lessons from Großvater. Organon F, 33(2), 218–237. https://doi.org/10.31577/orgf.2026.33206
Chicago
Price, Huw. 2026. "Lewis and the Price of Time Travel: Lessons from Großvater." Organon F 33 (2): 218–237. https://doi.org/10.31577/orgf.2026.33206
Harvard
Price, H. (2026). Lewis and the Price of Time Travel: Lessons from Großvater. Organon F, 33(2), pp. 218–237. https://doi.org/10.31577/orgf.2026.33206
© Huw Price
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