What is it about lulls in conversation that make them so very uncomfortable? It has to do with how we connect with each other

The American philosopher David Lewis is remembered for defending modal realism: the view that non-actual possible worlds are as real as the actual world. But among those who knew him, he was as well known for his silences. ‘If someone asks David a question during a talk and he doesn’t know the answer right away,’ D H Mellor (my master’s supervisor and a close friend of Lewis) once told me, ‘he will sit in silence for as long as he needs while he thinks about it.’

Another philosopher with whom Lewis enjoyed a close friendship, Barry Taylor, also had a story about Lewis’s ability to tolerate the sort of silences that leave most people writhing. Speaking at the Melbourne Writers Festival in 2006, Taylor described his first encounter with Lewis – who ‘had absolutely no small-talk’ and ‘the unnerving habit of thinking before he spoke’ – in Oxford in the early 1970s:

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