This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Notes
See Alvin Plantinga,The Nature of Necessity (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), ch. 9, where he presents what may well be the most sophisticated and complex version of the free will defense ever developed, grounded in what he calls “transworld depravity.” This doctrine assumes that there is some middle knowledge. Specifically, it requires that God know what free agents would have done had he actualized alternative states of affairs. However, if there is no middle knowledge, then Plantinga's defense is unnecessary. He develops his doctrine specifically as a response to the very impressive refutation of the free will defense offered by John Mackie, which is also committed to middle knowledge. Hence, if there is none, Mackie's rejoinder fails, and traditional formulations of the free will defense will serve the purpose. See James Sennett,Modality, Probability, and Rationality: A Critical Examination of Alvin Plantinga's Philosophy (New York: Peter Lang Press, 1992), ch. 3. Elsewhere, Plantinga notes that, “Strictly speaking, [transworld depravity] doesn't depend onany counterfactuals of freedom being true ⋯. (What follows ⋯ is that if that were so, then no possible world containing free creatures is one that God could have weakly actualized).” “Self Profile,” in James Tomberlin and Peter van Inwagen, eds.,Alvin Plantinga (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1985), p. 52. But this just is, in Plantinga's technical jargon, the conclusion of the traditional free will defense, and is not dependent on the special considerations presented by the transworld depravity defense.
Robert Adams attributes this term to David Vriend in “Plantinga on the Problem of Evil,” in Tomberlin and van Inwagen, p. 254, n. 4.
James Sennett, “The Free Will Defense and Determinism,”Faith and Philosophy 8: 340–353.
“Reply to Robert M. Adams,” in Tomberlin and van Inwagen, p. 373.
Ibid., pp. 378f.
“Reason and Belief in God,” inFaith and Rationality, ed. Alvin Plantinga and Nicholas Wolterstorff (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983), pp. 47ff.
I first introduced this term in ch. 5 ofModality, Probability, and Rationality. This paragraph and the next two are adapted from the explication given there. In “Universal Sanction and Direct Justification,” unpublished, I develop the notion more fully.
“Middle Knowledge and the Problem of Evil,”American Philosophical Quarterly 14 (1977): 114f.
Ibid., p. 115.
Adams accounts for other supposedly obviously true CFF's (e.g.,If they had offered me $10,000 more, I would have taken the job, when it is true anyway that I took the job) by classifying them as what Goodman calls “semifactuals,” and offering a plausible account for their truth value that is not open to full CFF's (Ibid.)
My careful wording is deliberate. See n. 18 below.
See, e.g., Nelson Goodman,Fact, Fiction, and Forecast, 4th ed. (Cambridge: Harvard, 1983); David Lewis,Counterfactuals (London: Basil Blackwell, 1973); and Robert Stalnaker, “A Theory of Conditionals,” inStudies in Logical Theory, ed. Nicholas Rescher (London: Basil Blackwell, 1968).
Though onlysome are contingent. Some, e.g. those of the formIf J performs A, then J performs A, are necessarily true (as are any with necessarily false antecedents), while others, e.g. those of the formIf J performs A, then J refrains from performing A, are necessarily false. However, these examples need not worry us. There are some (indeed many) — including all the ones that need concern us here — that are contingent.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Additional information
I thank Bill Braun, Al Casullo, Keith Cooper, Phil Hugly, Al Plantinga, and Dave Reiter for very helpful conversations leading to and comments on earlier versions of this paper. I am especially grateful to Casullo for convincing me (against my will!) that key ideas in an earlier draft were fundamentally mistaken, and for helping me understand how the points I wished to make could be made without commitment to those mistakes. I also thank the participants of the 1990 Midwest Regional Meetings of the Society of Christian Philosophers in Lincoln, NE, before whom an earlier version was read and discussed, and an anonymous referee for theInternational Journal for Philosophy of Religion for helpful suggestions in bringing the manuscript to publishable form.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Sennett, J.F. Why think there are any true counterfactuals of freedom?. Int J Philos Relig 32, 105–116 (1992). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01315427
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01315427