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A difficulty for the possible worlds analysis of counterfactuals

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Abstract

I present a puzzle concerning counterfactual reasoning and argue that it should be solved by giving up the principle of substitution for logical equivalents.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. New York University, New York, NY, USA

    Kit Fine

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  1. Kit Fine
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Correspondence to Kit Fine.

Additional information

The present paper expands on material in the first part of Fine (2012). Much of the material was presented at the Whitehead Lectures at Harvard, 2009, the Townsend Lectures at Berkeley, 2010, the Nagel Lecture at Columbia, 2010, a conference on Propositions and Same-Saying at Sydney University, 2010, and at talks to the philosophy departments of University of Miami and Virginia Commonwealth University. I would like to thank the audiences at those meetings for many helpful comments and I am especially grateful to Paul Horwich and Crispin Wright for their valuable comments on a presentation of the material in a meeting of the Mind and Language Seminar at New York University, March 2012.

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Fine, K. A difficulty for the possible worlds analysis of counterfactuals. Synthese 189, 29–57 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-012-0094-y

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-012-0094-y

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