Counterfactual Research Articles

Art and Its Contrary-to-Fact Conditions

Art and Its Contrary-to-Fact Conditions

The Truth-conditions of Counterfactual Conditional Sentences1

The Truth-conditions of Counterfactual Conditional Sentences1

Subjunctive Conditionals

In this paper I shall be concerned primarily with contingent subjunctive conditionals, not to analyze them, but to argue that those who attempt such an analysis employing the concept of law—an approach which I confess seems promising—are at best providing logically sufficient conditions for the truth of contingent subjunctive conditionals and are not providing a correct analysis. My argument will have two parts. I shall first argue that the more plausible attempts to analyze our concept of law without subjunctive conditionals seem to fall prey to counter-examples. Secondly, I shall argue that even if we had an independent understanding of law, it is at least questionable that such an analysis could be employed in explicating conditions which are both logically necessary and sufficient for the truth of a subjunctive conditional.

An analysis of the counterfactual conditional.

An analysis of the counterfactual conditional.

Necessary Properties And Linnaean Essentialism

Quine's arguments against the attribution of essential properties de re to individuals have been the motivation for attempts at reinstating essentialism as a respectable metaphysical thesis and at defending the coherence of modal logic in general.I shall argue here along somewhat different lines, that the particular version of essentialism Quine objects to is in fact untenable but that this conclusion is far from entailing a commitment to some version of conventionalism, and in particular that it does not entail the view that the only kind of necessity that is coherent is de dicto necessity.In what follows, I shall assume, without arguing for it, that de re essentialism and subjunctive conditionals are intimately related, and in particular, that any version of de re essentialism which conflicts with our basic intuitions about subjunctive conditionals is untenable.

Information amplified: Memory for counterfactual conditionals.

Information amplified: Memory for counterfactual conditionals.

Counterfactuals and comparative possibility

Counterfactuals and comparative possibility

Dispositions Revisited

Subjunctive conditionals have their uses, but constituting the meaning of dispositional predicates is not one of them. More germane is the analysis of dispositions in terms of “bases”—except that past efforts to maintain an ontic gap between dispositions and their bases, while not wholly misguided, have failed to appreciate the semantic birthright of dispositional concepts as a species of theoretical construct in primitive science.

Modal logic with subjunctive conditionals and dispositional predicates

Modal logic with subjunctive conditionals and dispositional predicates

The Essential but Implicit Role of Modal Concepts in Science

When J. C. C. McKinsey and I were working on the foundations of mechanics many years ago, we thought it important to give a rigorous axiomatization within standard set theory, and we therefore resisted any use of modal concepts or counterfactual conditionals in the formulation of the axioms of mechanics. I continue to think that the use of an extensional set-theoretical framework is appropriate and adequate for most, if not all, scientific discourse. As my interests have shifted more to the foundations of probability and the applications of probability concepts in the behavioral sciences, however, I have gradually come to the position that modal concepts, especially as expressed in the use of probability concepts, are essential to standard scientific talk. Yet, in a majority of cases the modal concepts remain implicit in that talk, and their logic is scarcely used in either theoretical or experimental analyses of empirical phenomena.

Completeness and decidability of three logics of counterfactual conditionals1

A sentence Q] 0-t y is intended to mean, roughly, that y holds in certain of the possible worlds in which Q] holds: those of them that are most closely similar to our actual world. We could capture this intention most straightforwardly by positing a function f which selects, for any sentence 9 and world i, a set f(v, i) of worlds regarded as the set of worlds most closely similar to i out of the worlds in which Q] holds. But this approach is open to objection. Just as no real number greater than 1 is closest to 0, so it may be that none of the worlds in which Q] holds is most closely similar to i. It may be that for each of them, there is another still closer. To meet this difficulty, we could introduce the notion of degrees of similarity between worlds, and take Q] 0-t y to mean that, unless no worlds in which v holds are similar to any degree to our actual world, there is some degree of similarity to our actual world within which there are

Subjunctive conditionals and polarity reversals

Subjunctive conditionals and polarity reversals

The subjunctive conditional as relevant implication

The subjunctive conditional as relevant implication

VII.—LAWS, COINCIDENCES, COUNTERFACTUALS AND COUNTER-IDENTICALS

VII.—LAWS, COINCIDENCES, COUNTERFACTUALS AND COUNTER-IDENTICALS

Enunciados nomológicos y condicionales contrafácticos

Resumen

R. B. Angell. A propositional logic with subjunctive conditionals. The journal of symbolic logic, vol. 27 no. 3 (for 1962, pub. 1963), pp. 327–343.

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On Counterfactual Propositions

A counterfactual proposition is one which has the logical form: if then . a characteristic of hypotheses in general and which also has an antecedent which is factually false. An example of a counterf actual is: If there had been no railroads in 1890, then the Gross National Product of that year would have been smaller by a finite but small amount.' Such propositions are also called subjunctive conditionals. Contrary to what first thoughts suggest, such propositions are widely used both in science in general and in economics in particular. They are not the raw material of sheer scholasticism. Recently, economic historians have become interested in their use, have in fact employed them, and also made them a subject of discussion. Redlich, for example, has viewed them as the most novel and dubious aspect of the new economic history.2 Despite their current interest, the issues involved in their use in economic history have not been explored at any length.

John Watling. The problem of contrary-to-fact conditionals. Analysis (Oxford), vol. 17 no. 4 (1957), pp. 73–80. - Alan R. White. Contrary-to-fact conditionals and logical impossibility. Analysis (Oxford), vol. 18 no. 1 (1957), pp. 14–16. - Sidney Gendin and Robert Hoffman. On verifying contrary-to-fact subjunctive conditionals. The Indian journal of philosophy, vol. 3 no. 10 (for 1962, pub. 1964), pp. 282–284.

John Watling. The problem of contrary-to-fact conditionals. Analysis (Oxford), vol. 17 no. 4 (1957), pp. 73–80. - Alan R. White. Contrary-to-fact conditionals and logical impossibility. Analysis (Oxford), vol. 18 no. 1 (1957), pp. 14–16. - Sidney Gendin and Robert Hoffman. On verifying contrary-to-fact subjunctive conditionals. The Indian journal of philosophy, vol. 3 no. 10 (for 1962, pub. 1964), pp. 282–284.

Some Recent Work on the Problem of Law

It is widely agreed that ‘scientific law’ (or ‘law of nature’) is one of the key scientific terms which any adequate philosophy of science must attempt to clarify or define. The importance of the concept ‘law’ is made evident by the fact that the distinctive functions of science—explanation and prediction—are usually analyzed with reference to laws. Thus events are explained by showing that descriptions of them are deducible from laws (conjoined with suitable statements of “initial conditions”), and laws are utilized in deducing descriptions of unknown future events, thereby permitting their prediction. Moreover, it has recently become clear that the concept ‘law’ is relevant to the analysis of counterfactual conditionals, disposition terms, and the physical modalities. An adequate explication of ‘law’, then, will further the analysis of these important concepts.

On Subjunctive Conditionals

On Subjunctive Conditionals