Abstract
I have argued for a kind of ‘counterfactual scepticism’: most counterfactuals ever uttered or thought in human history are false. I briefly rehearse my main arguments. Yet common sense recoils. Ordinary speakers judge most counterfactuals that they utter and think to be true. A common defence of such judgments regards counterfactuals as context-dependent: the proposition expressed by a given counterfactual can vary according to the context in which it is uttered. In normal contexts, the counterfactuals that we utter are typically true, the defence insists, while granting that there may be more rarefied contexts in which they are false. I give a taxonomy of such contextualist replies. One could be a contextualist about the counterfactual connective, about its antecedent, or about its consequent. I offer some general concerns about all these varieties of contextualism. I then focus especially on antecedent-contextualism, as I call it. I firstly raise some high-level objections to it. Then, I look at such a contextualist account due to Sandgren and Steele. I think it has many virtues, but also some problems. I conclude with some avenues for future research.
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Notes
Here is a key passage:
(1) If the match were struck, it would light.
… it should be unproblematic to qualify the consequent of (1) in either of the following ways, while leaving the meaning of the conditional—completely or at least almost completely—unaffected:
(2) If the match were struck, it would necessarily [definitely] light
(3) If the match were struck, it would be very likely to light. (p. 36)
That said, he goes on to reconstruct (3) as a conditional chance statement:
(4) The conditional chance of the match lighting given that it is struck is very high. (p. 37)
Thanks to an anonymous referee here.
Here I assume for simplicity that her getting stuck behind a tall person entails her not seeing Pedro dance. If not, just change the entailed counterfactual to: ‘if Sophie had attended the parade, she would not have been prevented from seeing Pedro dance’.
I replace their “C” with “B” to conform with the notation of my template, for which I reserve “C” to mark the context.
Notice that their view, as I have presented it, does not mention levels of scientific inquiry at all, although their paper does (even in its nice title). All the work seems to be done by the relevant “domain of scientific inquiry” (p. 4).
As an anonymous referee has pointed out, this example, like some others in this paper, would be classified by linguists as a future less vivid conditional. It is about the future, with the antecedent still realisable, but there is an implicature that it is more likely to be false than true. (See Iatridou 2000). On the other hand, I think that all of the examples in this paper would count as “counterfactuals” according to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s classification. (See Starr 2019, §1.1.) This is not merely a terminological issue if the distinction matters to the semantics, as some think it does (e.g. Iatridou). However, since neither Sandgren and Steele nor I offer semantics for such conditionals, I believe that my discussion can proceed without resolving this semantic issue. All that matters for my purposes are that my arguments go through for the falsehood of the conditionals, and against Sandgren and Steele’s interpretation of them—particularly that it weakens them so as to change their meaning.
In the background are broader issues concerning standards of precision, loose talk, and the extent to which strict interpretations of the things that we say are appropriate (see e.g. D. Lewis 1979, 1989; Bolinger and Sandgren 2020). I can happily allow laxer interpretations of various other parts of our language; all I insist on here is that counterfactuals require strict interpretations, for the reasons I have given.
In what follows I am grateful for discussion with Alex Sandgren.
Thanks here to Justin D’Ambrosio.
To be sure, the original statement may well have been perfectly reasonable to say, when you said it. But that’s a matter of pragmatics: a little hyperbole may well be acceptable in a normal conversation.
K. Lewis (2016) distinguishes between “forced” and “natural context shifts”, and she acknowledges that in “forced shifts, those induced by the skeptic, if the skeptical possibility is accommodated, it is difficult to downshift to a less strict context” (p. 304). So she would presumably agree with my “not easy” claim here. However, she also offers two cases in which such “downshifting” seems to be felicitous. I think that “forced shifts” may draw our attention to nomic possibilities that are and always were relevant—but this is too big a topic to pursue adequately here.
This is somewhat analogous to Stalnaker’s (1981) supervaluational approach to conditionals, when there are multiple candidates for the selection function that selects the closest antecedent-world.
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Acknowledgements
I thank particularly Hannes Leitgeb, Cory Nichols, Alex Sandgren, Katie Steele, Jeremy Strasser, the audience at The Fourth Taiwan Philosophical Logic Colloquium (TPLC 2018), National Taiwan University, and two anonymous referees for Synthese for very helpful comments. Special thanks to Justin D’Ambrosio for many valuable conversations and feedback.
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Hájek, A. Counterfactual scepticism and antecedent-contextualism. Synthese 199, 637–659 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-020-02686-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-020-02686-0