Results for 'Counterfactuality'

636 found
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  1. Levelling counterfactual scepticism.Katie Steele & Alexander Sandgren - 2020 - Synthese 199 (1-2):927-947.
    In this paper, we develop a novel response to counterfactual scepticism, the thesis that most ordinary counterfactual claims are false. In the process we aim to shed light on the relationship between debates in the philosophy of science and debates concerning the semantics and pragmatics of counterfactuals. We argue that science is concerned with many domains of inquiry, each with its own characteristic entities and regularities; moreover, statements of scientific law often include an implicit ceteris paribus clause that restricts the (...)
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  2. Counterfactual Thinking and Regulatory Fit.Keith Markman, Matthew McMullen, Ronald Elizaga & Nobuko Mizoguchi - 2006 - Judgment and Decision Making 1 (2):98-107.
    According to regulatory fit theory (Higgins, 2000), when people make decisions with strategies that sustain their regulatory focus orientation, they “feel right” about what they are doing, and this “feeling-right” experience then transfers to subsequent choices, decisions, and evaluations. The present research was designed to link the concept of regulatory fit to functional accounts of counterfactual thinking. In the present study, participants generated counterfactuals about their anagram performance, after which persistence on a second set of anagrams was measured. Under promotion (...)
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  3. Against Counterfactual Miracles.Cian Dorr - 2016 - Philosophical Review 125 (2):241-286.
    This paper considers how counterfactuals should be evaluated on the assumption that determinism is true. I argue against Lewis's influential view that the actual laws of nature would have been false if something had happened that never actually happened, and in favour of the competing view that history would have been different all the way back. I argue that we can do adequate justice to our ordinary practice of relying on a wide range of historical truths in evaluating counterfactuals by (...)
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  4. Counterfactuals and explanation.Boris Kment - 2006 - Mind 115 (458):261-310.
    On the received view, counterfactuals are analysed using the concept of closeness between possible worlds: the counterfactual 'If it had been the case that p, then it would have been the case that q' is true at a world w just in case q is true at all the possible p-worlds closest to w. The degree of closeness between two worlds is usually thought to be determined by weighting different respects of similarity between them. The question I consider in the (...)
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  5. Causal Counterfactuals and Impossible Worlds.Daniel Nolan - 2017 - In Helen Beebee, Christopher Hitchcock & Huw Price (eds.), Making a Difference: Essays on the Philosophy of Causation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 14-32.
    A standing challenge in the theory of counterfactuals is to solve the “deviation problem”. Consider ordinary counterfactuals involving an antecedent concerning a difference from the actual course of events at a particular time, and a consequent concerning, at least in part, what happens at a later time. In the possible worlds framework, the problem is often put in terms of which are the relevant antecedent worlds. Desiderata for the solution include that the relevant antecedent worlds be governed by the actual (...)
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  6. Counterfactual Decision Theory.Brian Hedden - 2023 - Mind 132 (527):730-761.
    I defend counterfactual decision theory, which says that you should evaluate an action in terms of which outcomes would likely obtain were you to perform it. Counterfactual decision theory has traditionally been subsumed under causal decision theory as a particular formulation of the latter. This is a mistake. Counterfactual decision theory is importantly different from, and superior to, causal decision theory, properly so called. Causation and counterfactuals come apart in three kinds of cases. In cases of overdetermination, an action can (...)
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  7.  51
    Counterfactuals 2.0: Logic, Truth Conditions, and Probability.Giuliano Rosella - 2023 - Dissertation, University of Turin
    The present thesis focuses on counterfactuals. Specifically, we will address new questions and open problems that arise for the standard semantic accounts of counterfactual conditionals. The first four chapters deal with the Lewisian semantic account of counterfactuals. On a technical level, we contribute by providing an equivalent algebraic semantics for Lewis' variably strict conditional logics, which is notably absent in the literature. We introduce a new kind of algebra and differentiate between local and global versions of each of Lewis' variably (...)
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  8. Most Counterfactuals Are False.Alan Hajek - 2014
    I argue that most counterfactuals are false.
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  9. Counterfactual Probability.Ginger Schultheis - 2023 - Journal of Philosophy 120 (11):581-614.
    Stalnaker's Thesis about indicative conditionals is, roughly, that the probability one ought to assign to an indicative conditional equals the probability that one ought to assign to its consequent conditional on its antecedent. The thesis seems right. If you draw a card from a standard 52-card deck, how confident are you that the card is a diamond if it's a red card? To answer this, you calculate the proportion of red cards that are diamonds -- that is, you calculate the (...)
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  10. Counterfactual Skepticism and Multidimensional Semantics.H. Orri Stefánsson - 2018 - Erkenntnis 83 (5):875-898.
    It has recently been argued that indeterminacy and indeterminism make most ordinary counterfactuals false. I argue that a plausible way to avoid such counterfactual skepticism is to postulate the existence of primitive modal facts that serve as truth-makers for counterfactual claims. Moreover, I defend a new theory of ‘might’ counterfactuals, and develop assertability and knowledge criteria to suit such unobservable ‘counterfacts’.
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  11. Counterfactual Desirability.Richard Bradley & H. Orii Stefansson - 2017 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 68 (2):485-533.
    The desirability of what actually occurs is often influenced by what could have been. Preferences based on such value dependencies between actual and counterfactual outcomes generate a class of problems for orthodox decision theory, the best-known perhaps being the so-called Allais Paradox. In this paper we solve these problems by extending Richard Jeffrey's decision theory to counterfactual prospects, using a multidimensional possible-world semantics for conditionals, and showing that preferences that are sensitive to counterfactual considerations can still be desirability maximising. We (...)
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  12. Counterfactuals, indeterminacy, and value: a puzzle.Eli Pitcovski & Andrew Peet - 2022 - Synthese 200 (1):1-20.
    According to the Counterfactual Comparative Account of harm and benefit, an event is overall harmful for a subject to the extent that this subject would have been better off if it had not occurred. In this paper we present a challenge for the Counterfactual Comparative Account. We argue that if physical processes are chancy in the manner suggested by our best physical theories, then CCA faces a dilemma: If it is developed in line with the standard approach to counterfactuals, then (...)
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  13. Counterfactual Attitudes and the Relational Analysis.Kyle Blumberg - 2018 - Mind 127 (506):521-546.
    In this paper, I raise a problem for standard precisifications of the Relational Analysis of attitude reports. The problem I raise involves counterfactual attitude verbs. such as ‘wish’. In short, the trouble is this: there are true attitude reports ‘ S wishes that P ’ but there is no suitable referent for the term ‘that P ’. The problematic reports illustrate that the content of a subject’s wish is intimately related to the content of their beliefs. I capture this fact (...)
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  14. Mechanisms, counterfactuals and laws.Stavros Ioannidis & Stathis Psillos - 2017 - In Stuart Glennan & Phyllis McKay Illari (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Mechanisms and Mechanical Philosophy. Routledge. pp. 144-156.
    In this chapter we examine the relation between mechanisms and laws/counterfactuals by revisiting the main notions of mechanism found in the literature. We distinguish between two different conceptions of ‘mechanism’: mechanisms-of underlie or constitute a causal process; mechanisms-for are complex systems that function so as to produce a certain behavior. According to some mechanists, a mechanism fulfills both of these roles simultaneously. The main argument of the chapter is that there is an asymmetrical dependence between both kinds of mechanisms and (...)
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  15. (2 other versions)Counterfactuals and Explanatory Pluralism.Kareem Khalifa, Gabriel Doble & Jared Millson - 2018 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 71 (4):1439-1460.
    Recent literature on non-causal explanation raises the question as to whether explanatory monism, the thesis that all explanations submit to the same analysis, is true. The leading monist proposal holds that all explanations support change-relating counterfactuals. We provide several objections to this monist position. 1Introduction2Change-Relating Monism's Three Problems3Dependency and Monism: Unhappy Together4Another Challenge: Counterfactual Incidentalism4.1High-grade necessity4.2Unity in diversity5Conclusion.
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  16. Counterfactual Thinking, Persistence, and Performance: A Test of the Reflection and Evaluation Model.Keith Markman, Matthew McMullen & Ronald Elizaga - 2008 - Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 44 (2):421-428.
    The present research extends previous functional accounts of counterfactual thinking by incorporating the notion of reflective and evaluative processing. Participants generated counterfactuals about their anagram performance, after which their persistence and performance on a second set of anagrams was measured. Evaluative processing of upward counterfactuals elicited a larger increase in persistence and better performance than did reflective processing of upward counterfactuals, whereas reflective processing of downward counterfactuals elicited a larger increase in persistence and better performance than did evaluative processing of (...)
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  17. Counterfactuals, hyperintensionality and Hurford disjunctions.Hüseyin Güngör - 2023 - Linguistics and Philosophy 46 (1):169-195.
    This paper investigates propositional hyperintensionality in counterfactuals. It starts with a scenario describing two children playing on a seesaw and studies the truth-value predictions for counterfactuals by four different semantic theories. The theories in question are Kit Fine’s truthmaker semantics, Luis Alonso-Ovalle’s alternative semantics, inquisitive semantics and Paolo Santorio’s syntactic truthmaker semantics. These predictions suggest that the theories that distinguish more of a given set of intensionally equivalent sentences (Fine and Alonso-Ovalle’s) fare better than those that do not (inquisitive semantics (...)
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  18. Counterfactuals, counteractuals, and free choice.Fabio Lampert & Pedro Merlussi - 2020 - Philosophical Studies 178 (2):445-469.
    In a recent paper, Pruss proves the validity of the rule beta-2 relative to Lewis’s semantics for counterfactuals, which is a significant step forward in the debate about the consequence argument. Yet, we believe there remain intuitive counter-examples to beta-2 formulated with the actuality operator and rigidified descriptions. We offer a novel and two-dimensional formulation of the Lewisian semantics for counterfactuals and prove the validity of a new transfer rule according to which a new version of the consequence argument can (...)
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  19. Counterfactual Attitudes and Multi-Centered Worlds.Dilip Ninan - 2012 - Semantics and Pragmatics 5 (5):1-57.
    Counterfactual attitudes like imagining, dreaming, and wishing create a problem for the standard formal semantic theory of de re attitude ascriptions. I show how the problem can be avoided if we represent an agent's attitudinal possibilities using "multi-centered worlds", possible worlds with multiple distinguished individuals, each of which represents an individual with whom the agent is acquainted. I then present a compositional semantics for de re ascriptions according to which singular terms are "assignment-sensitive" expressions and attitude verbs are "assignment shifters".
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  20. Counterfactuals of divine freedom.Yishai Cohen - 2016 - International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 79 (3):185-205.
    Contrary to the commonly held position of Luis de Molina, Thomas Flint and others, I argue that counterfactuals of divine freedom are pre-volitional for God within the Molinist framework. That is, CDFs are not true even partly in virtue of some act of God’s will. As a result, I argue that the Molinist God fails to satisfy an epistemic openness requirement for rational deliberation, and thus she cannot rationally deliberate about which world to actualize.
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  21. Presupposing Counterfactuality.Julia Zakkou - 2019 - Semantics and Pragmatics 12.
    There is long standing agreement both among philosophers and linguists that the term ‘counterfactual conditional’ is misleading if not a misnomer. Speakers of both non-past subjunctive (or ‘would’) conditionals and past subjunctive (or ‘would have’) conditionals need not convey counterfactuality. The relationship between the conditionals in question and the counterfactuality of their antecedents is thus not one of presupposing. It is one of conversationally implicating. This paper provides a thorough examination of the arguments against the presupposition view as (...)
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  22. Ambifictional Counterfactuals.Andrew D. Bassford - 2023 - Philosophies 8 (6):108.
    In this paper, I argue that David Lewis’s possible world semantics for counterfactual discourse and for fictional discourse are apparently inconsistent and in need of revision. The problem emerges for Lewis’s account once one considers how to evaluate ambifictional counterfactuals. Since this is likely not a concept familiar to most, and since it does not appear that the problem has been previously recognized in the critical literature, I will begin by rehearsing Lewis’s possible worlds semantics for counterfactuals and fiction. Then (...)
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  23. Counterfactual Thinking: Function and Dysfunction.Keith Markman, Figen Karadogan, Matthew Lindberg & Ethan Zell - 2009 - In Keith Douglas Markman, William Martin Klein & Julie A. Suhr (eds.), Handbook of Imagination and Mental Simulation. New York City, New York, USA: Psychology Press. pp. 175-194.
    Counterfactual thinking—the capacity to reflect on what would, could, or should have been if events had transpired differently—is a pervasive, yet seemingly paradoxical human tendency. On the one hand, counterfactual thoughts can be comforting and inspiring (Carroll & Shepperd, Chapter 28), but on the other they can be anxiety provoking and depressing (Zeelenberg & Pieters, Chapter 27). Likewise, such thoughts can illuminate pathways toward better future outcomes (Wong, Galinsky, & Kray, Chapter 11), yet they can also promote confusion and lead (...)
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  24. Counterfactuals of Ontological Dependence.Sam Baron - 2022 - Journal of the American Philosophical Association 8 (2):278-299.
    A great deal has been written about 'would' counterfactuals of causal dependence. Comparatively little has been said regarding 'would' counterfactuals of ontological dependence. The standard Lewis-Stalnaker semantics is inadequate for handling such counterfactuals. That's because some of these counterfactuals are counterpossibles, and the standard Lewis-Stalnaker semantics trivializes for counterpossibles. Fortunately, there is a straightforward extension of the Lewis-Stalnaker semantics available that handles counterpossibles: simply take Lewis's closeness relation that orders possible worlds and unleash it across impossible worlds. To apply the (...)
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  25. Assimilation and Contrast in Counterfactual Thinking and Other Mental Simulation-Based Comparison Processes.Keith Markman, Jennifer Ratcliff, Nobuko Mizoguchi, Ronald Elizaga & Matthew McMullen - 2007 - In Diederik A. Stapel & Jerry M. Suls (eds.), Assimilation and Contrast in Social Psychology. Psychology Press. pp. 187-206.
    This chapter examines when and how mental simulation--the consideration of alternatives to present reality--produces emotional responses that reflect either contrast or assimilation. The chapter begins with a description of a comparison domain that is most commonly associated with mental simulation--counterfactual thinking. Then the authors consider how mental simulation plays a critical role in determining assimilative and contrastive responses to other type of comparisons. The chapter concludes with a presentation of a model of mental simulation-based comparison processes and describe its relationship (...)
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  26. Counterfactuals as Strict Conditionals.Andrea Iacona - 2015 - Disputatio 7 (41):165-191.
    This paper defends the thesis that counterfactuals are strict conditionals. Its purpose is to show that there is a coherent view according to which counterfactuals are strict conditionals whose antecedent is stated elliptically. Section 1 introduces the view. Section 2 outlines a response to the main argument against the thesis that counterfactuals are strict conditionals. Section 3 compares the view with a proposal due to Aqvist, which may be regarded as its direct predecessor. Sections 4 and 5 explain how the (...)
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  27. Counterfactuals without Possible Worlds? A Difficulty for Fine’s Exact Semantics for Counterfactuals.Brian Embry - 2014 - Journal of Philosophy (5):276-287.
    In this paper I argue that there is a difficulty for Fine's exact semantics for counterfactuals. The difficulty undermines Fine's reasons for preferring exact semantics to possible worlds semantics.
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  28. Modal History versus Counterfactual History: History as Intention.Vasil Penchev - 2021 - Philosophy of Science eJournal (Elsevier: SSRN) 14 (22):1-8.
    The distinction of whether real or counterfactual history makes sense only post factum. However, modal history is to be defined only as ones’ intention and thus, ex-ante. Modal history is probable history, and its probability is subjective. One needs phenomenological “epoché” in relation to its reality (respectively, counterfactuality). Thus, modal history describes historical “phenomena” in Husserl’s sense and would need a specific application of phenomenological reduction, which can be called historical reduction. Modal history doubles history just as the recorded (...)
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  29. Determinism, Counterfactuals, and Decision.Alexander Sandgren & Timothy Luke Williamson - 2021 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 99 (2):286-302.
    Rational agents face choices, even when taking seriously the possibility of determinism. Rational agents also follow the advice of Causal Decision Theory (CDT). Although many take these claims to be well-motivated, there is growing pressure to reject one of them, as CDT seems to go badly wrong in some deterministic cases. We argue that deterministic cases do not undermine a counterfactual model of rational deliberation, which is characteristic of CDT. Rather, they force us to distinguish between counterfactuals that are relevant (...)
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  30. Counterfactuals and their Truthmakers.Joshua Anderson - 2014 - Polish Journal of Philosophy 8 (2):7-24.
    This article compares David Lewis’s understanding of counterfactuals with a Platonic theory of counterfactual truthmakers. By pointing to some weaknesses in Lewis’s theory, it will highlight some of the strengths of the Platonic theory. The article will progress in the following way. First, I present David Lewis’s understanding of counterfactuals, and discuss some problems the theory has. Next, I discuss Platonic truthmakers, in general, and then show how this applies to counterfactuals. Finally, I discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the (...)
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  31. Counterfactuals for causal responsibility in legal contexts.Holger Andreas, Matthias Armgardt & Mario Gunther - 2023 - Artificial Intelligence and Law 31 (1):115-132.
    We define a formal semantics of conditionals based on _normatively ideal worlds_. Such worlds are described informally by Armgardt (Gabbay D, Magnani L, Park W, Pietarinen A-V (eds) Natural arguments: a tribute to john woods, College Publications, London, pp 699–708, 2018) to address well-known problems of the counterfactual approach to causation. Drawing on Armgardt’s proposal, we use iterated conditionals in order to analyse causal relations in scenarios of multi-agent interaction. This results in a refined counterfactual approach to causal responsibility in (...)
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  32. Counterfactuals and modality.Gabriel Greenberg - 2021 - Linguistics and Philosophy 44 (6):1255-1280.
    This essay calls attention to a set of linguistic interactions between counterfactual conditionals, on one hand, and possibility modals like could have and might have, on the other. These data present a challenge to the popular variably strict semantics for counterfactual conditionals. Instead, they support a version of the strict conditional semantics in which counterfactuals and possibility modals share a unified quantificational domain. I’ll argue that pragmatic explanations of this evidence are not available to the variable analysis. And putative counterexamples (...)
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  33. Counterfactuals and laws with violations.Cameron Gibbs - 2020 - Synthese 198 (11):10643-10659.
    Evaluating counterfactuals in worlds with deterministic laws poses a puzzle. In a wide array of cases, it does not seem plausible that if a non-actual event were to occur that either the past would be different or that the laws would be different. But it’s also difficult to see how we can avoid this result. Some philosophers have argued that we can avoid this dilemma by allowing that a proposition can be a law even though it has violations. On this (...)
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  34. Counterfactuals and the analysis of necessity.Boris Kment - 2006 - Philosophical Perspectives 20 (1):237–302.
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  35. Counterfactual Contamination.Simon Goldstein & John Hawthorne - 2022 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 100 (2):262-278.
    Many defend the thesis that when someone knows p, they couldn’t easily have been wrong about p. But the notion of easy possibility in play is relatively undertheorized. One structural idea in the literature, the principle of Counterfactual Closure (CC), connects easy possibility with counterfactuals: if it easily could have happened that p, and if p were the case, then q would be the case, it follows that it easily could have happened that q. We first argue that while CC (...)
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  36. Counterfactual Dependence and Arrow.Thomas Kroedel & Franz Huber - 2012 - Noûs 47 (3):453-466.
    We argue that a semantics for counterfactual conditionals in terms of comparative overall similarity faces a formal limitation due to Arrow’s impossibility theorem from social choice theory. According to Lewis’s account, the truth-conditions for counterfactual conditionals are given in terms of the comparative overall similarity between possible worlds, which is in turn determined by various aspects of similarity between possible worlds. We argue that a function from aspects of similarity to overall similarity should satisfy certain plausible constraints while Arrow’s impossibility (...)
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  37. Downward Counterfactuals and Motivation: The Wake-Up Call and the Pangloss Effect.Keith Markman & Matthew McMullen - 2000 - Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 26 (5):575-584.
    Three studies examined the motivational implications of thinking about how things could have been worse. It was hypothesized that when these downward counterfactuals yield negative affect, through consideration of the possibility of a negative outcome, motivation to change and improve would be increased (the wake-up call). When downward counterfactuals yield positive affect, through diminishing the impact of a potentially negative outcome, motivation to change and improve should be reduced (the Pangloss effect). Results from three studies supported these hypotheses. Studies 1 (...)
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  38. Counterfactual reasoning and knowledge of possibilities.Dominic Gregory - 2017 - Philosophical Studies 174 (4):821-835.
    Williamson has argued against scepticism concerning our metaphysically modal knowledge, by arguing that standard patterns of suppositional reasoning to counterfactual conclusions provide reliable sources of correct ascriptions of possibility and necessity. The paper argues that, while Williamson’s claims relating to necessity may well be right, he has not provided adequate reasons for thinking that the familiar modes of counterfactual reasoning to which he points generalise to provide a decent route to ascriptions of possibility. The paper also explores another path to (...)
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  39. Counterfactual Similarity, Nomic Indiscernibility, and the Paradox of Quidditism.Andrew D. Bassford & C. Daniel Dolson - 2024 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 67 (1):230-261.
    Aristotle is essentially human; that is, for all possible worlds metaphysically consistent with our own, if Aristotle exists, then he is human. This is a claim about the essential property of an object. The claim that objects have essential properties has been hotly disputed, but for present purposes, we can bracket that issue. In this essay, we are interested, rather, in the question of whether properties themselves have essential properties (or features) for their existence. We call those who suppose they (...)
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  40. Counterfactual Conditionals: Orthodoxy and its Challenges.Daniel Dohrn - 2020 - Milan: Mimesis International.
    In Counterfactual Conditionals, Daniel Dohrn discusses the standard account of counterfactuals, conditionals of the form ‘If A had been the case, then B would have been the case’. According to the standard account, a counterfactual is true if the then-sentence is true in all closest worlds in which the if-sentence is true. Closeness is spelled out in terms of an ordering of worlds by their similarity. Dohrn explores resources of defending the standard account against several challenges. In particular, he defends (...)
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  41. Counterfactuals, Overdetermination and Mental Causation.Simona Aimar - 2011 - Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 111 (3pt3):469-477.
    The Exclusion Problem for mental causation suggests that there is a tension between the claim that the mental causes physical effects, and the claim that the mental does not overdetermine its physical effects. In response, Karen Bennett puts forward an extra necessary condition for overdetermination : if one candidate cause were to occur but the other were not to occur, the effect would still occur. She thus denies one of the assumptions of EP, the assumption that if an effect has (...)
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  42. Counterfactual Structure and Learning from Experience in Negotiations.Keith Markman, Laura Kray & Adam Galinsky - 2009 - Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 45 (4):979-982.
    Reflecting on the past is often a critical ingredient for successful learning. The current research investigated how counterfactual thinking, reflecting on how prior experiences might have been different, motivates effective learning from these previous experiences. Specifically, we explored how the structure of counterfactual reflection – their additive (‘‘If only I had”) versus subtractive (‘‘If only I had not”) nature – influences performance in dyadic-level strategic interactions. Building on the functionalist account of counterfactuals, we found across two experiments that generating additive (...)
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  43. Can Counterfactuals Really Be about Possible Worlds?Stephen Barker - 2011 - Noûs 45 (3):557-576.
    The standard view about counterfactuals is that a counterfactual (A > C) is true if and only if the A-worlds most similar to the actual world @ are C-worlds. I argue that the worlds conception of counterfactuals is wrong. I assume that counterfactuals have non-trivial truth-values under physical determinism. I show that the possible-worlds approach cannot explain many embeddings of the form (P > (Q > R)), which intuitively are perfectly assertable, and which must be true if the contingent falsity (...)
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  44. Counterfactuals of Freedom and the Luck Objection to Libertarianism.Robert J. Hartman - 2017 - Journal of Philosophical Research 42 (1):301-312.
    Peter van Inwagen famously offers a version of the luck objection to libertarianism called the ‘Rollback Argument.’ It involves a thought experiment in which God repeatedly rolls time backward to provide an agent with many opportunities to act in the same circumstance. Because the agent has the kind of freedom that affords her alternative possibilities at the moment of choice, she performs different actions in some of these opportunities. The upshot is that whichever action she performs in the actual-sequence is (...)
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  45. How Strong Is a Counterfactual?David Boylan & Ginger Schultheis - 2021 - Journal of Philosophy 118 (7):373-404.
    The literature on counterfactuals is dominated by strict accounts and variably strict accounts. Counterexamples to the principle of Antecedent Strengthening were thought to be fatal to SA; but it has been shown that by adding dynamic resources to the view, such examples can be accounted for. We broaden the debate between VSA and SA by focusing on a new strengthening principle, Strengthening with a Possibility. We show dynamic SA classically validates this principle. We give a counterexample to it and show (...)
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  46. Counterfactual skepticism is (just) skepticism.David Boylan - 2023 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 108 (1):259-286.
    Counterfactual skepticism says that most ordinary counterfactuals are false. While few endorse counterfactual skepticism, the precise costs of the view are disputed and not generally well-understood. I have two aims in this paper. My first and primary aim is to establish, on grounds acceptable to all parties, that counterfactual skepticism is not benign. I argue it leads to significant skepticism about the future: if counterfactual skepticism is true, then we can have only very limited knowledge about the future. I give (...)
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  47. The Paradox of Counterfactual Tolerance.Daniel Berntson - manuscript
    Counterfactuals are somewhat tolerant. Had Socrates been at least six feet tall, he need not have been exactly six feet tall. He might have been a little taller—he might have been six one or six two. But while he might have been a little taller, there are limits to how tall he would have been. Had he been at least six feet tall, he would not have been more than a hundred feet tall, for example. Counterfactuals are not just tolerant, (...)
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  48. Counterfactuals and the law.Simon Beck - 1993 - South African Journal of Philosophy 12 (3).
    This article is concerned with the place counterfactual reasoning occupies in South African law, and how philosophy might be able to help the law. I point out some of the more important and unavoidable uses of counterfactual reasoning in our law. Following this I make some suggestions as to how philosophy, and especially informal logic, can be of help to the law. Finally, I make some suggestions as to how the law in turn can help philosophy.
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  49. Counterfactual donkeys don't get high.Michael Deigan - 2018 - Proceedings of Sinn Und Bedeutung 22 1:367--384.
    I present data that suggest the universal entailments of counterfactual donkey sentences aren’t as universal as some have claimed. I argue that this favors the strategy of attributing these entailments to a special property of the similarity ordering on worlds provided by some contexts, rather than to a semantically encoded sensitivity to assignment.
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  50. Counterfactual reasoning.Roberta Ferrario - 2001 - In P. Bouquet V. Akman (ed.), Modeling and Using Context. Springer. pp. 170--183.
    Primary goal of this paper is to show that counterfactual reasoning, as many other kinds of common sense reasoning, can be studied and analyzed through what we can call a cognitive approach, that represents knowledge as structured and partitioned into different domains, everyone of which has a specific theory, but can exchange data and information with some of the others. Along these lines, we are going to show that a kind of ``counterfactual attitude'' is pervasive in a lot of forms (...)
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