forum 2: week of 16 Jan - Lewis

Lewis's rules do not seem to capture a very solid reasoning behind contextualism. Yes, his modality and Rule of Actuality seem plausible, with uneliminated possibilities highlighting the importance of the spatial and temporal features of experience. The Rule of Belief neglects to state a sufficiently high possibilities to be properly ignored, beyond actuality. The Rule of Attention I find difficult to understand, attending to context-dependence of making an additional comment to another that was previously said. This seems to break any sense of closure, based on its context in the conversation. Where does is the line drawn between what are purely thoughts and what is said in the Rule of Attention? At this point is it properly ignoring a possibility if it is not said? Bound by these conversational suggestions, it appears to not account for mistakes, impulsivity or useless statements in such that they are of equal relevance now to the conversation. (But, perhaps, this is exactly what Lewis was trying to argue with his nearest possible worlds, in that they are in fact a possibility.)