Abstract
Several theists, including Linda Zagzebski, have claimed that theism is somehow committed to nonvacuism about counterpossibles. Even though Zagzebski herself has rejected vacuism, she has offered an argument in favour of it, which Edward Wierenga has defended as providing strong support for vacuism that is independent of the orthodox semantics for counterfactuals, mainly developed by David Lewis and Robert Stalnaker. In this paper I show that argument to be sound only relative to the orthodox semantics, which entails vacuism, and give an example of a semantics for counterfactuals countenancing impossible worlds for which it fails.
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Notes
There are fine distinctions here between Lewis and Stalnaker. The latter (but not the former) accepts the Limit Assumption, that is, the thesis that there is always a smallest set of worlds most similar to the antecedent world. Whether one accepts the Limit Assumption has important consequences on the exact formulation of truth conditions for counterfactuals (see, for instance, Brogaard and Salerno 2013, pp. 640–641). However, we are mostly concerned here about counterpossibles, and will pass over some of the details about counterfactuals in general.
This is, of course, the concept of God traditionally assumed by western philosophers and, in particular, analytic philosophy of religion.
I am using “essential” as synonym for “necessary” here, which is controversial since at least Fine (1994). But there is no need to make substantial assumptions concerning essence for the purposes of this paper, for one could just as well formulate the ideas above by using only the notion of necessity.
Zagzebski (1990, p. 169).
I purposefully confuse use and mention with respect to logical symbols for readability.
A caveat: I have in mind here single premise conditional proof, for conditional proof with multiple premises fails even in the usual Lewis/Stalnaker semantics for counterfactuals. See, for instance, Nolan (2016, p. 2637).
It might be objected that the possibility introduced here violates the Lewisian doctrine of Humean supervenience, namely, that if two worlds are identical in the matters of particular fact that they support, they are also identical in their modal and counterfactual properties (see Lewis 1986b, p. 111). If one countenances Humean supervenience, then one needs to modify the example accordingly. This can be done simply by assuming some contingent feature of the world to vary in the case God is not omnipotent. Other examples similar to these are mentioned in Nolan (1997), especially p. 544.
I use brackets around the numbers mentioned by Wierenga since these are different from the ones I ended up having here.
Pollock (1984, p. 113).
The argument we consider here is the simplified version of that of Wierenga (1999, top of p. 92), but there is no significant difference, and the same point could be made with respect to the other, more complicated argument.
Another option is to offer arguments for vacuism that are truly independent of the orthodox semantics. This is, in part, done by Williamson (2017). But since this paper focuses on Wierenga’s arguments, a treatment of Williamson’s arguments should be done elsewhere.
Nolan (1997) also adds a set \(\pi\) of propositions, with a short discussion offered on p. 563. This may be added to the models, but we do not need it for the purposes of this paper.
Nolan (2016) explores the failure of conditional proof in another context, as a way of blocking Curry’s paradox.
As Dowty et al. (1981, p. 2) puts, native speakers’ “judgments of synonymy, entailment, contradiction, and so on” provide the grounds according to which we evaluate semantic theories.
This examples comes from Nolan (1997, p. 544).
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I would like to thank an anonymous referee for comments and encouragement.
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Lampert, F. Wierenga on theism and counterpossibles. Philos Stud 176, 693–707 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-018-1035-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-018-1035-5