Counterfactual Entailment is the view that a counterfactual conditional is true just in case its antecedent entails its consequent. I present an argument for Counterfactual Entailment, and I develop a strategy for explaining away apparent counterexamples to the view. The strategy appeals to the suppositional view of counterfactuals, on which a counterfactual is essentially a statement, made relative to the supposition of its antecedent, of its consequent.

ArgumentThis paper argues that ancient Babylonian signs (omens) reflect a mode of inferential reasoning as a function of their syntactic and logical structure as conditionals. Taking into account the institutional context that produced a systematic written body of omens, the paper is principally interested in the cognitive disposition of such texts. Investigating what constitutes system in these works, formal aspects of the material are examined in terms of the nature of conditionals and the logic of conditional statements. It is argued (...) that conditional statements about ominous phenomena speak as much to a notion of conceivability and possibility as to empirical physical actuality. It is claimed that the epistemological character of the Babylonian compendia of signs cannot be understood without due attention to epistemic possibility and further, that the cuneiform omen texts comprise a different kind of scientific knowledge from that limited to a knowledge of physical phenomena and their laws. (shrink)

Book Information Real Conditionals. By William Lycan. Clarendon Press. Oxford. 2001. Pp. 234. Hardback, £25.

I argue that the suppositional view of conditionals, which is quite popular for indicative conditionals, extends also to subjunctive or counterfactual conditionals. According to this view, conditional judgements should not be construed as factual, categorical judgements, but as judgements about the consequent under the supposition of the antecedent. The strongest evidence for the view comes from focusing on the fact that conditional judgements are often uncertain; and conditional uncertainty, which is a well-understood notion, does not function like uncertainty about matters (...) of fact. I argue that the evidence for this view is as strong for subjunctives as it is for indicatives. (shrink)

An organizing theme of the dissertation is the issue of how to make philosophical theories useful for scientific purposes. An argument for the contention is presented that it doesn’t suffice merely to theoretically motivate one’s theories, and make them compatible with existing data, but that philosophers having this aim should ideally contribute to identifying unique and hard to vary predictions of their theories. This methodological recommendation is applied to the ranking-theoretic approach to conditionals, which emphasizes the epistemic relevance and the (...) expression of reason relations as part of the semantics of the natural language conditional. As a first step, this approach is theoretically motivated in a comparative discussion of other alternatives in psychology of reasoning, like the suppositional theory of conditionals, and novel approaches to the problems of compositionality and accounting for the objective purport of indicative conditionals are presented. In a second step, a formal model is formulated, which allows us to derive quantitative predictions from the ranking-theoretic approach, and it is investigated which novel avenues of empirical research that this model opens up for. Finally, a treatment is given of the problem of logical omniscience as it concerns the issue of whether ranking theory (and other similar approaches) makes too idealized assumptions about rationality to allow for interesting applications in psychology of reasoning. Building on the work of Robert Brandom, a novel solution to this problem is presented, which both opens up for new perspectives in psychology of reasoning and appears to be capable of satisfying a range of constraints on bridge principles between logic and norms of reasoning, which would otherwise stand in a tension. (shrink)