Quantifiers,Knowledge, and Counterfactuals

Many of the motivations in favor of contextualism about knowledge apply also to a contextualist approach to counterfactuals. I motivate and articulate such an approach, in terms of the context‐sensitive ‘all cases’, in the spirit of David Lewis’s contextualist view about knowledge. The resulting view explains intuitive data, resolves a puzzle parallel to the skeptical paradox, and renders safety and sensitivity, construed as counterfactuals, necessary conditions on knowledge.     

Judgements,Expertise, and Counterfactuals

Abstract

In The Philosophy of Philosophy (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), Tim Williamson has offered a sophisticated account of thought experiments and of modal epistemology. More recently, he has also engaged in a variant of the so-called ‘expertise defence’ of traditional philosophical methodology. In this paper I argue that if Williamson’s account of thought experiments and of modal epistemology is right, this seriously undermines his version of the expertise defence.     

Causes,Counterfactuals, and Non-Locality

In order to motivate the thesis that there is no single concept of causation that can do justice to all of our core intuitions concerning that concept, Ned Hall has argued that there is a conflict between a counterfactual criterion of causation and the condition of causal locality. In this paper I critically examine Hall's argument within the context of a more general discussion of the role of locality constraints in a causal conception of the world. I present two strategies that defenders of counterfactual accounts of causation can pursue to respond to Hall's challenge—including the adoption of a counterfactual condition that is sufficient for causal action-at-a-distance in place of Hall's ‘process’ condition—and conclude that Hall's argument against counterfactual accounts of causation is unsuccessful.     

Counterfactuals,emotions, and context

Participants recalled either a negative academic or interpersonal experience, and the relations among counterfactual thinking, negative emotions, and attributions of blame and control were examined. Situational context effects on attribution, counterfactual thinking, and emotion were observed, indicating a greater tendency toward self-focused cognition and emotion in the academic context than in the interpersonal context. Consistent with recent theorising, upward counterfactual thinking was associated with negative emotions of guilt, shame, regret, disappointment, and sadness. However, there was no indication that downward counterfactual thinking regulated emotion as previous literature suggests. Implications for functional and process theories of counterfactual thinking are discussed.     

Causes,Conditions and Counterfactuals

The article deals with one particular problem created by the counterfactual analysis of causality à la Lewis, namely the context-sensitivity problem or, as I prefer to call it, the background condition problem. It appears that Lewis’ counterfactual definition of causality cannot distinguish between proper causes and mere causal conditions – i.e. factors necessary for the effect to occur, but commonly not seen as causally efficacious. The proposal is put forward to amend the Lewis definition with a condition, based on the notion of cotenability, which would eliminate the problem. It is shown that the corrected definition of causality leads to the transitivity of the causal relation. Possible objections to the proposed solution, involving the assumption of indeterminism and the preemption cases, are given a thorough consideration.     

Time Travel,Coincidences and Counterfactuals

Philosophical Studies - In no possible world does a time traveler succeed in killing herearlier self before she ever enters a time machine. So if many,many time travelers went back in time trying...     

Counterfactuals

In this article I offer an approach to counterfactuals based on a notion of objective probability. It is in the spirit of, though it does not fall squarely under, the metalinguistic model. Thus, it is not developed in terms of possible worlds, or notions parasitic on them (e.g., similarity). Its dominant features are rooted in objective probability and causal relevance (analyzed probabilistically), and thus it is not close in spirit to a maximal similarity or a minimal change approach.     

Sequential Counterfactuals,Cotenability and Temporal Becoming

Philosophical Studies -     

Counterfactuals and Context-Sensitivity

It is commonly agreed that when evaluating the validity of an argument involving context-sensitive expressions, the context should be held fixed. In their 2008 essay “Counterfactuals and Context,” Brogaard and Salerno argue further that context should be held fixed when evaluating an argument involving counterfactuals for validity, since, as many will agree, counterfactuals are context-sensitive. In the present paper, it will however be argued that Brogaard and Salerno fail to distinguish between two different roles that context plays in determining the meaning of a given counterfactual. If they were fully aware of the distinction between these two roles played by context, they might propose a contextualist approach to counterfactuals, as has been developed by Ichikawa in his 2011 paper “Quantifiers, Knowledge, and Counterfactuals.”     

Choice-Driven Counterfactuals

Journal of Philosophical Logic - In this paper, we investigate the semantics and logic of choice-driven counterfactuals, that is, of counterfactuals whose evaluation relies on auxiliary premises...     

Elusive Counterfactuals

I offer a novel solution to the problem of counterfactual skepticism: the worry that all contingent counterfactuals without explicit probabilities in the consequent are false. I argue that a specific kind of contextualist semantics and pragmatics for would‐ and might‐counterfactuals can block both central routes to counterfactual skepticism. One, it can explain the clash between would‐ and might‐counterfactuals as in: (1) If you had dropped that vase, it would have broken. and (2) If you had dropped that vase, it might have safely quantum tunneled to China. Two, it can explain why counterfactuals like (1) can be true despite the fact that quantum tunneling worlds are among the most similar worlds. I further argue that this brand of contextualism accounts for the data better than other existing solutions to the problem.     

Counterfactuals,the National Economy,and Voting Choice

Previous research has shown that counterfactual thinking (“if only…”) is related to event explanation, blame assignment, and future decisions. Using data from a large-scale electoral panel survey (ITANES), we investigated the association between pre-election counterfactual thoughts on the national economy and subsequent voting choice. Results revealed that voters focused counterfactuals on the government and other political or economic actors but also, and more frequently, on unspecified or reified actors. Whereas counterfactuals focused on the government were associated with voting for the challenger, counterfactuals focused on political or economic actors or on reified actors were associated with voting for the incumbent. These associations were even stronger when counterfactuals had a subtractive (“if only X had not…”) rather than an additive (“if only X had…”) structure. The inclusion of the targets of the counterfactuals added significantly to the predictive value of a model of voting choice based on voters’ evaluation of the national economy.     

Space-Time Counterfactuals

A definition is proposed to give precise meaning to the counterfactual statements that often appear in discussions of the implications of quantum mechanics. Of particular interest are counterfactual statements which involve events occurring at space-like separated points, which do not have an absolute time ordering. Some consequences of this definition are discussed. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Counterfactuals and Historical Possibility

We show that truth conditions for counterfactuals need not always be given in terms of a vague notion of similarity. To this end, we single out the important class of historical counterfactuals and give formally rigorous truth conditions for these counterfactuals, employing a partial ordering relation called “comparative closeness” that is defined in the framework of branching space-times. Among other applications, we provide a detailed analysis of counterfactuals uttered in the context of lost bets. In an appendix we compare our theory with the branching space-times based reading of counterfactuals recently proposed by Belnap.