Choice-Driven Counterfactuals

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate the semantics and logic of choice-driven counterfactuals, that is, of counterfactuals whose evaluation relies on auxiliary premises about how agents are expected to act, i.e., about their default choice behavior. To do this, we merge one of the most prominent logics of agency in the philosophical literature, namely stit logic (Belnap et al. 2001; Horty 2001), with the well-known logic of counterfactuals due to Stalnaker (1968) and Lewis (1973). A key component of our semantics for counterfactuals is to distinguish between deviant and non-deviant actions at a moment, where an action available to an agent at a moment is deviant when its performance does not agree with the agent’s default choice behavior at that moment. After developing and axiomatizing a stit logic with action types, instants, and deviant actions, we study the philosophical implications and logical properties of two candidate semantics for choice-driven counterfactuals, one called rewind models inspired by Lewis (Nous13(4), 455–476 1979) and the other called independence models motivated by well-known counterexamples to Lewis’s proposal Slote (Philos. Rev.87(1), 3–27 1978). In the last part of the paper we consider how to evaluate choice-driven counterfactuals at moments arrived at by some agents performing a deviant action.