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.
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Yes, you can access Counterfactuals by David Lewis in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Philosophy & Logic in Philosophy. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.
âIf kangaroos had no tails, they would topple overâ seems to me to mean something like this: in any possible state of affairs in which kangaroos have no tails, and which resembles our actual state of affairs as much as kangaroos having no tails permits it to, the kangaroos topple over. I shall give a general analysis of counterfactual conditionals along these lines.
My methods are those of much recent work in possible-world semantics for intensional logic.* I shall introduce a pair of counterfactual conditional operators intended to correspond to the various counterfactual conditional constructions of ordinary language; and I shall interpret these operators by saying how the truth value at a given possible world of a counterfactual conditional is to depend on the truth values at various possible worlds of its antecedent and consequent.
Counterfactuals are notoriously vague. That does not mean that we cannot give a clear account of their truth conditions. It does mean that such an account must either be stated in vague termsâwhich does not mean ill-understood termsâor be made relative to some parameter that is fixed only within rough limits on any given occasion of language use. It is to be hoped that this imperfectly fixed parameter is a familiar one that we would be stuck with whether or not we used it in the analysis of counterfactuals; and so it will be. It will be a relation of comparative similarity.
Let us employ a language containing these two counterfactual conditional operators:
read as âIf it were the case that ___, then it would be the case thatâŚâ, and
read as âIf it were the case that ___, then it might be the case that...â.For instance, the two sentences below would be symbolized as shown.
If Otto behaved himself, he would be ignored.
Otto behaves himself
Otto is ignored
If Otto were ignored, he might behave himself.
Otto is ignored
Otto behaves himself
There is to be no prohibition against embedding counterfactual conditionals within other counterfactual conditionals. A sentence of such a form as this.
will be perfectly well formed and will be assigned truth conditions, although doubtless it would be such a confusing sentence that we never would have occasion to utter it.
The two counterfactual operators are to be interdefinable as follows.
Thus we can take either one as primitive. Its interpretation determines the interpretation of the other. I shall take the âwouldâ counterfactual
as primitive.
Other operators can be introduced into our language by definition in terms of the counterfactual operators, and it will prove useful to do so. Certain modal operators will be thus introduced in Sections 1.5 and 1.7; modified versions of the counterfactual in Section 1.6; and âcomparative possibilityâ operators in Section 2.5.
My official English readings of my counterfactual operators must be taken with a good deal of caution. First, I do not intend that they should interfere, as the counterfactual constructions of English sometimes do, with the tenses of the antecedent and consequent. My official reading of the sentence
We were finished packing Monday night
we departed Tuesday morning
comes out as a sentence obscure in meaning and of doubtful grammatically:
If it were the case that we were finished packing Monday night, then it would be the case that we departed Tuesday morning.
In the correct reading, the subjunctive âwereâ of the counterfactual construction and the temporal âwereâ of the antecedent are transformationally combined into a past subjunctive:
If we had been finished packing Monday night, then we would have departed Tuesday morning.
Second, the âIf it were the case that___â of my official reading of
is not meant to imply that it is not the case that___. Counterfactuals with true antecedentsâcounterfactuals that are not counterfactualâare not automatically false, nor do they lack truth value. This stipulation does not seem to me at all artificial. Granted, the counterfactual constructions of English do carry some sort of presupposition that the antecedent is false. It is some sort of mistake to use them unless the speaker does take the antecedent to be false, and some sort of mishap to use them when the speaker wrongly takes the antecedent to be false. But there is no reason to suppose that every sort of presupposition failure must produce automatic falsity or a truth-value gap. Some or all sorts of presupposition, and in particular the presupposition that the antecedent of a counterfactual is false, may be mere matters of conversational implicature, without any effect on truth conditions. Though it is difficult to find out the truth conditions of counterfactuals with true antecedents, since they would be asserted only by mistake, we will see later (in Section 1.7) how this may be done.
You may justly complain, therefore, that my title âCounterfactualsâ is too narrow for my subject. I agree, but I know no better. I cannot claim to be giving a theory of conditionals in general. As Ernest Adams has observed,* the first conditional below is probably true, but the second may very well be false. (Change the example if you are not a Warrenite.)
If Oswald did not kill Kennedy, then someone else did.
If Oswald had not killed Kennedy, then someone else would have.
Therefore there really are two different sorts of conditional; not a single conditional that can appear as indicative or as counterfactual depending on the speakerâs opinion about the truth of the antecedent.
The title âSubjunctive Conditionalsâ would not have delineated my subject properly. For one thing, there are shortened counterfactual conditionals like âNo Hitler, no A-bombâ that have no subjunctives except in theirâstill all-too-hypotheticalâdeep structure. More important, there are subjunctive conditionals pertaining to the future, like â If our ground troops entered Laos next year, there would be troubleâ that app...
