Lewis in Motion: Six Substantive Developments Around Worlds and Scorekeeping
A first evidence-led scan of 2024-2026 work extending Lewisian scorekeeping into therapy and social language while testing modal realism through representation and anthropic reasoning.
The Short Version
The recent work is moving in two different but connected directions. Lewis's scorekeeping idea is being treated as a live framework for explaining how discourse changes, with applications reaching psychotherapy and social-political language. His modal realism is being tested less as a self-contained doctrine than as a pressure point in debates about representation, anthropic reasoning, and the relation between possible worlds and propositions.
This first scan covers substantive publications and public records dated from July 2024 through June 2026. I excluded items that only cite Lewis, calls for papers, and records whose available material did not establish a real argument. It is a starting map rather than a claim to exhaustive coverage.
Scorekeeping: From Context Update to Social Practice
Dänzer, Rinner, and Kulakova: the framework becomes a research program
Conversational Scorekeeping is the clearest recent attempt to take stock of what grew out of the Stalnaker-Lewis picture. Lars Dänzer, Stefan Rinner, and Eugenia Kulakova present scorekeeping as the study of how speech and context mutually change during conversation, then compare competing interpretations of what a conversational score is supposed to be. Their survey also asks whether scorekeeping can be integrated with Gricean implicature and speech-act theory, and tracks applications in social and political philosophy of language. 1
The important development is methodological. The Lewisian metaphor is no longer doing only one job, such as explaining presupposition accommodation. It is being used as a common platform for disputes about context, commitment, permissibility, and power in conversation. That makes the central question less "does a conversation have a score?" and more "which score changes, by which speech acts, under which norms?"
Rinner: therapy as score change
Stefan Rinner's Scorekeeping in a Therapeutic Language Game gives the framework a concrete institutional application. The paper argues that talking therapies work linguistically by changing the score of the therapeutic conversation, especially through accommodation. It treats therapeutic interventions as covert exercitives: speech acts that alter what is permissible, sayable, or available as a conversational possibility. The proposed payoff is practical as well as theoretical, since the account bears on how therapists are trained to handle linguistic change. 2
Cambridge lists the article in Philosophy 99(4) and gives 18 March 2025 as its online publication date. The paper matters for this tracker because it does more than borrow Lewis's baseball analogy: it proposes that a therapeutic relationship changes the rules and background against which later utterances are assessed.
Plurality: Representation, Evidence, and the Cost of Lewis's Realism
Deasy: a higher-orderist answer to Lewis's objection
Daniel Deasy's Possible Worlds as Propositions takes up a central Lewisian challenge to abstract-world theories: if possible worlds are propositions or other abstract objects, how do they represent possibilities at all? Deasy's response is to identify possible worlds with propositions while rejecting the assumption that propositions are first-order abstract objects, or objects in the relevant sense. He instead treats higher-order quantification as genuine and argues that this gives a relatively direct account of how worlds-as-propositions represent possibilities. 3
This is a substantive extension of the debate around On the Plurality of Worlds. It does not try to rehabilitate Lewis's concrete worlds. It attacks one of the reasons Lewis thought abstract ersatz worlds could not do the explanatory work required of a theory of modality.
Fisher: Lewis's own route to worlds becomes a liability
A.R.J. Fisher's David Lewis on Ways Things Might Be: An Examination of Modal Realism through Lewis's Correspondence reconstructs a different route to modal realism: the move from talk of ways things might be to possible worlds. Fisher follows the evolution of that argument in Lewis's thought, compares it with magical ersatzism, and argues that Lewis's criticism of the ersatzist argument turns the argument back against Lewis. The paper then claims that Lewis's later commitment to Ramseyan humility exposes him to a similar criticism, making the argument a "poisoned pawn" for Lewis. 4
The contribution is interpretive and critical at once. Rather than repeating the familiar objection that modal realism is extravagant, Fisher asks whether the argumentative machinery Lewis uses to motivate it can remain stable across Lewis's own writings.
Gómez-Torrente: anthropic reasoning remains a live pressure point
Mario Gómez-Torrente's Modal Realism and Anthropic Reasoning examines arguments that claim to find an inconsistency between Lewisian modal realism and anthropic reasoning. The article focuses on a recent argument that tries to derive such an inconsistency and evaluates whether that pressure really reaches Lewis's view. The record identifies the target as a substantive argument about the interaction between modal realism and anthropic assumptions, not a general exposition of Lewis. 5
This line of work changes the debate's center of gravity. The question is no longer only whether concrete possible worlds are too many. It is whether a theory that contains all possible observers can coexist with principled rules for reasoning from the fact that we find ourselves in one particular observer position.
Adelstein and Wollen: modal realism as one horn of an anthropic trilemma
Matthew Adelstein and Amos Wollen's open-access paper, A Presumptuous Path to Theism, Modal Realism, or Axiarchism, gives the most recent and most direct new application in this scan. Conditional on the Self-Indication Assumption, they argue that our existence strongly confirms a disjunction: maximizing theism, modal realism, or axiarchism, over what they call garden-variety atheism. The modal-realist horn works because Lewisian realism entails that every possible observer exists. 6
This is not a new defence of all of Lewis's metaphysics. It is an application of one Lewisian commitment inside an argument about self-locating evidence and philosophy of religion. That distinction matters: the paper makes modal realism useful for a new explanatory task while also tying it to a controversial anthropic principle.
What Counts as Progress Here?
Across the six items, three developments stand out:
- Scorekeeping is broadening. Recent work treats conversational score as a family of models for updating context, norms, and permissibility, not as a single fixed theory of presupposition.
- The modal debate is becoming more targeted. New arguments address representation, the internal evolution of Lewis's justification, and anthropic evidence rather than simply restating the extravagance objection.
- Applications create new liabilities. Therapy, social power, self-location, and philosophy of religion make Lewisian machinery useful, but they also expose the extra assumptions that the machinery needs.
The next updates should therefore track two kinds of change: new arguments about what a score is and how it changes, and new uses of concrete possible worlds in debates where the modal ontology is only one part of a larger argument.
Evidence Boundary
The dates and claims above come from the linked journal, publisher, DOI, and structured bibliographic records checked for this issue. The coverage is selective: I did not count the 2026 call for papers on themes from Lewis's metaphysics as a research result, and I did not promote broad manuscript listings without enough accessible detail to verify a substantive contribution.
References
- 1Conversational Scorekeeping
doi.org
- 2Scorekeeping in a Therapeutic Language Game
cambridge.org
- 3Possible Worlds as Propositions
academic.oup.com
- 4
- 5
- 6A Presumptuous Path to Theism, Modal Realism, or Axiarchism
link.springer.com
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