Counterfactuals without possible worlds

Journal of Philosophy

Volumn 109, Issue 3, 2012, Pages 221-246

  Fine, Kit ^a  

^a NEW YORK UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 84867743445     PISSN: 0022362X     EISSN: 19398549     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.5840/jphil201210938     Document Type: Article

References (18)

1. Robert Stalnaker, "A Theory of Conditionals," in Nicholas Rescher, ed., Studies in Logical Theory, American Philosophical Quarterly Monograph Series, Number 2 (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1968), pp. 98-112;
2. David Lewis, Counterfactuals (Cambridge: Harvard, 1973).
3. Ibid., p. 20. A related argument is to be found in Lewis, "Ordering Semantics and Premise Semantics for Counterfactuals," Journal of Philosophical Logic, x, 2 (May 1981): 217-34, at pp. 229-30.
4. As pointed out in John L. Pollock, "The 'Possible Worlds' Analysis of Counter-factuals," Philosophical Studies, xxix, 6 (June 1976): 469-76, at p. 471;
5. Pollock, Subjunctive Reasoning (Boston: D. Reidel, 1976), p. 20;
6. Hans G. Herzberger, "Counterfactuals and Consistency," this journal, lxxvi, 2 (February 1979): 83-88.
7. Pollock, "The 'Possible Worlds' Analysis of Counterfactuals," p. 471;
8. A suggestion along similar lines is also made in Graeme Forbes, Attitude Problems: An Essay on Linguistic Intensionality (New York: Oxford, 2006), pp. 108-09.
9. n ed. (Boston: Kluwer, 2002), pp. 1-98.
10. Barry Loewer, "Counterfactuals with Disjunctive Antecedents," this journal, lxxiii, 16 (Sep. 16, 1976): 531-37.
11. Thomas McKay and Peter van Inwagen, "Counterfactuals with Disjunctive Antecedents," Philosophical Studies, xxxi, 5 (May 1977): 353-56.
12. In a remarkable reversal, Nute in "Conversational Scorekeeping and Conditionals," Journal of Philosophical Logic, ix, 2 (May 1980): 153-66, at p. 161, went from accepting Simplification to rejecting it for just this reason.
13. Versions of the semantics are to be found in Bas C. van Fraassen, "Facts and Tautological Entailments," this journal, lxvi, 15 (Aug. 7, 1969): 477-87;
14. Lenhart K. Schubert, "The Situations We Talk About," in Jack Minker, ed., Logic-Based Artificial Intelligence (Boston: Kluwer, 2000), pp. 407-39;
15. reprinted in Fine, Modality and Tense: Philosophical Papers (New York: Oxford, 2005), pp. 357-65.
16. There is a significant connection with the metaphysical notion of ground, discussed in §5 of Fine, "Guide to Ground," to be published in a collection of papers edited by Fabrice Correia and Benjamin Schnieder, eds., Metaphysical Grounding: Understanding the Structure of Reality (New York: Cambridge, 2012).
17. An account along these lines is presented in Judea Pearl, Causality: Models, Reasoning, and Inference (New York: Cambridge, 2000).
18. Some of these difficulties are discussed by Rachael Briggs in "Interventionist Counterfactuals," Philosophical Studies, CLX, 1 (2012): 139-66. We can actually use the previous puzzle to prove that no reasonable solution to this problem exists.