Counterfactuals is David Lewis' forceful presentation of and sustained argument for a particular view about propositions which express contrary to fact conditionals, including his famous defense of realism about possible worlds and his theory of laws of nature.

The standard use of the propositional calculus ('P.C.?) in analyzing the validity of inferences involving conditionals leads to fallacies, and the problem is to determine where P.C. may be ?safely? used. An alternative analysis of criteria of reasonableness of inferences in terms of conditions of justification rather than truth of statements is proposed. It is argued, under certain restrictions, that P. C. may be safely used, except in inferences whose conclusions are conditionals whose antecedents are incompatible with the premises in (...) the sense that if the antecedent became known, some of the previously asserted premises would have to be withdrawn. (shrink)

Classic work by one of the most brilliant figures in post-war analytic philosophy.

THE INDICATIVE CONDITIONAL. A PROBABILISTIC CRITERION OF SOUNDNESS FOR DEDUCTIVE INFERENCES Our objective in this section is to establish a prima facie case ...

A collection of all but two of the author's philosophical essays and lectures originally published or presented before August 1976.

Conditional sentences are among the most intriguing and puzzling features of language, and analysis of their meaning and function has important implications for, and uses in, many areas of philosophy. Jonathan Bennett, one of the world's leading experts, distils many years' work and teaching into this Philosophical Guide to Conditionals, the fullest and most authoritative treatment of the subject. An ideal introduction for undergraduates with a philosophical grounding, it also offers a rich source of illumination and stimulation for graduate students (...) and professional philosophers. (shrink)

Conditionals has at its center an extended essay on this problematic and much-debated subject in the philosophy of language and logic, which the widely respected Oxford philosopher Michael Woods had been preparing for publication at the time of his death in 1993. It appears here edited by his eminent colleague David Wiggins, and is accompanied by a commentary specially written by a leading expert on the topic, Dorothy Edgington. This masterly and original treatment of conditionals will demand the attention of (...) all philosophers working in this area. (shrink)

Provides comprehensive coverage of logical structure as well as the techniques of formal reasoning.

I develop an account of counterfactual conditionals using “causal models”, and argue that this account is preferable to the currently standard account in terms of “similarity of possible worlds” due to David Lewis and Robert Stalnaker. I diagnose the attraction of counterfactual theories of causation, and argue that it is illusory.

A conditional takes the form ‘If A, then C’. On the truth-conditional view of conditionals, conditional statements state things with truth-conditions. On the suppositional view, conditional statements involve the expression of a supposition. I develop and defend a view on which conditional statements both state things with truth-conditions and express suppositions. On this view, something is fundamentally right about standard truth-conditional and standard suppositional views. Considerations in favor of conditional contents lead us to attribute truth-conditional contents to conditional statements; considerations (...) in favor of the suppositional view then lead us to an unexpected account of these contents. The resulting view has a number of benefits, including a unified treatment of conditional speech acts, a plausible account of our practice of ascribing truth-values to conditional statements, a simple explanation of the apparent equivalence between probabilities of conditionals and conditional probabilities, an intuitive treatment of ‘Gibbardian stand-offs’, a plausible logic of conditionals, and an explanation of why theorizing about conditionals has proved so difficult. (shrink)

It seems to be generally accepted that (a) counterfactual conditionals are to be analysed in terms of possible worlds and inter-world relations of similarity and (b) causation is conceptually prior to counterfactuals. I argue here that both (a) and (b) are false. The argument against (a) is not a general metaphysical or epistemological one but simply that, structurally speaking, possible worlds theories are wrong: this is revealed when we try to extend them to cover the case of probabilistic counterfactuals. Indeed (...) a type of counterfactual probability exists which cannot be expressed in possible worlds terms at all. The argument against (b) emerges when we look at the form of an adequate account of both probabilistic and non-probabilistic counterfactuals. I do this by sketching and defending an approach to counterfactuals that, first, invoke a generalized notion of cause as primitive and, secondly, is algorithmic in form: counterfactuals are evaluated algorithmically in terms of other counterfactuals, without vicious circularity. Structures like possible worlds do not play a role either in general truth-conditions or in evaluation. They are simply the wrong sorts of structures. (shrink)