I think you’re (maybe deliberately) being unfair to David Lewis here.
I’m pretty sure that if you’d asked him “Are there, in the actual world, talking donkeys?” he would have said no. Which is roughly what most people would take “Are there talking donkeys?” to mean. And if someone says “there are talking donkeys”, at least part of why we think there’s something unreasonable about that is that if there were talking donkeys then we would expect to have seen them, and we haven’t, which is not true of talking donkeys that inhabit other possible-but-not-actual worlds.
David Lewis believed (or at least professed to believe; I think he meant it) that the things we call “possible worlds” are as real as the world we inhabit. But he didn’t think that they are the actual world and he didn’t think that things existing in them need exist in the actual world. And I think (what I conjecture to have been) his actual opinion on this question is less absurd and more reasonable than the opinion you say, or at least imply, or at least insinuate, that he held.
This is one of my biggest pet-peeves about a lot of languages, they basically have no way to bound the domain of discourse without getting quite complicated, and perhaps getting more formal as well, and in ordinary communication, a claim is usually assumed to have a bounded domain of discourse that’s different from the set of all possible X, whether it’s realities, worlds or whatever else is being talked about here, and I think this is the main problem with the attempt to make claim “In the real world, there are talking donkeys” sound absurd, because the real word is essentially attempting to bound the domain of discourse to talk about 1 world, the world we live in.
I think you’re (maybe deliberately) being unfair to David Lewis here.
I’m pretty sure that if you’d asked him “Are there, in the actual world, talking donkeys?” he would have said no. Which is roughly what most people would take “Are there talking donkeys?” to mean. And if someone says “there are talking donkeys”, at least part of why we think there’s something unreasonable about that is that if there were talking donkeys then we would expect to have seen them, and we haven’t, which is not true of talking donkeys that inhabit other possible-but-not-actual worlds.
David Lewis believed (or at least professed to believe; I think he meant it) that the things we call “possible worlds” are as real as the world we inhabit. But he didn’t think that they are the actual world and he didn’t think that things existing in them need exist in the actual world. And I think (what I conjecture to have been) his actual opinion on this question is less absurd and more reasonable than the opinion you say, or at least imply, or at least insinuate, that he held.
This is one of my biggest pet-peeves about a lot of languages, they basically have no way to bound the domain of discourse without getting quite complicated, and perhaps getting more formal as well, and in ordinary communication, a claim is usually assumed to have a bounded domain of discourse that’s different from the set of all possible X, whether it’s realities, worlds or whatever else is being talked about here, and I think this is the main problem with the attempt to make claim “In the real world, there are talking donkeys” sound absurd, because the real word is essentially attempting to bound the domain of discourse to talk about 1 world, the world we live in.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_of_discourse