Fictionalism and the Logic of “As If” Conditionals

Abstract

The paper accepts Hans Vaihinger’s suggestion that “as if’ conditionals contain a counterfactual element and aims to developing a formal analysis of them by using conditionals expressing a consequential connection between the clauses. The key idea is that ”as if’ counterfactuals are explicit counterfactuals with true consequents, whose rendering is unproblematic at the propositional level. The most interesting problems however arise when the “as if’ concerns not a comparison between facts but a comparison between gradable predicates. The solution proposed here relies on Seuren’s theory of comparison and make an essential use of existential quantification over extents, while existential quantification over predicates allows to render the notion of similarity which appears to be involved in many ordinary uses of “as if”. It is stressed that the proposed analysis gives a solution also to the problem of so-called counter-comparatives, which has been treated by David Lewis in the framework of counterpart theory.