Fall 2020 Colloquium Series - 13 November
Alan Hájek (ANU) :: "Most Counterfactuals Are Still False – And That’s OK!"
Friday, November 13 2020
Abstract:
I have long argued for a kind of ‘counterfactual skepticism’: most counterfactuals are false. I maintain that the chanciness associated with most counterfactuals’ consequents, and the unspecificity associated with their antecedents, entail their falsehood. For example, I claim that these counterfactuals are both false:
(Chanciness) If the coin had been tossed, it would have landed heads (not tails!).
(Unspecificity) If I had a son (somehow or other), he would have an even number of hairs on his head at his birth (not odd!).
And I argue that most counterfactuals are relevantly similar to one or both of these, as far as their truth-values go. I also have arguments from the incompatibility of ‘would’ and ‘might not’ counterfactuals, and more. However, counterfactuals play an important role in science, social science, and especially philosophy. And ordinary speakers judge many counterfactuals that they utter to be true. A number of philosophers have defended our judgments against counterfactual skepticism. Some follow David Lewis in appealing to ‘quasi-miracles’; Robbie Williams appeals to ‘typicality’; John Hawthorne and H. Orri Stefánsson to primitive counterfactual facts (‘counterfacts’); Moritz Schulz to an arbitrary-selection semantics; Jonathan Bennett and Hannes Leitgeb to high conditional probabilities; Karen Lewis to contextually-sensitive ‘relevance’. I argue against each of these proposals. A recurring theme is that they fail to respect certain valid inference patterns. I also offer my own positive theory for the truth conditions of typical counterfactuals: ‘if A had been the case, B would have been the case’ is true iff the conditional chance of B, given A, was 1 (shortly before the time of the antecedent). I conclude that most counterfactuals are still false, but that’s no cause for alarm. Falsehood gets a bad rap.
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