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Counterfactuals and Historical Possibility

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Abstract

We show that truth conditions for counterfactuals need not always be given in terms of a vague notion of similarity. To this end, we single out the important class of historical counterfactuals and give formally rigorous truth conditions for these counterfactuals, employing a partial ordering relation called “comparative closeness” that is defined in the framework of branching space-times. Among other applications, we provide a detailed analysis of counterfactuals uttered in the context of lost bets. In an appendix we compare our theory with the branching space-times based reading of counterfactuals recently proposed by Belnap.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Philosophy, Jagiellonian University, Grodzka, 52, 31-044, Kraków, Poland

    Tomasz Placek

  2. Philosophisches Seminar, LFB III, Lennéstr. 39, 53113, Bonn, Germany

    Thomas Müller

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  1. Tomasz Placek
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  2. Thomas Müller
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Correspondence to Thomas Müller.

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Placek, T., Müller, T. Counterfactuals and Historical Possibility. Synthese 154, 173–197 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-005-0617-x

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