Williamson on counterpossibles
The Reasoner (forthcoming)
| Abstract | Lewis/Stalnaker semantics has it that all counterpossibles (i.e., counterfactual conditionals with impossible antecedents) are vacuously true. Non-vacuism, by contrast, says the truth-values of counterpossibles are affected by the truth-values of the consequents. Some counterpossibles are true, some false. Williamson objects to non-vacuism. He asks us to consider someone who answered ‘11’ to ‘What is 5 + 7?’ but who mistakenly believes that he answered ‘13’. For the non-vacuist, (1) is false, (2) true: (1) If 5 + 7 were 13, x would have got that sum right (2) If 5 + 7 were 13, x would have got that sum wrong Williamson is not persuaded by the initial intuitiveness of such examples: ... they tend to fall apart when thought through. For example, if 5 + 7 were 13 then 5 + 6 would be 12, and so (by another eleven steps) 0 would be 1, so if the number of right answers I gave were 0, the number of right answers I gave would be 1. (2006) That’s the whole argument—much of it implicit. Alan Baker’s critique (2007) of Brogaard and Salerno (2007) prompts us to say something less abbreviated about a less abbreviated form of Wiliamson’s argument. Then we further develop our (2007) counterfactual analysis of essense | |||||||||
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Similar books and articlesLuca Moretti (2008). Brogaard and Salerno on Antirealism and the Conditional Fallacy. Philosophical Studies 140 (2):229 - 246.
Jesper Kallestrup (2009). Conceivability, Rigidity and Counterpossibles. Synthese 171 (3).
Richard Davis (2006). God and Counterpossibles. Religious Studies 42 (4):371-391.
Sonia Roca-Royes (2011). Modal Knowledge and Counterfactual Knowledge. Logique Et Analyse 54 (216):537-552.
Jeffrey Goodman (2004). An Extended Lewis-Stalnaker Semantics and The New Problem of Counterpossibles. Philosophical Papers 33 (1):35-66.
Berit Brogaard & Joe Salerno (forthcoming). Why Counterpossibles Are Non-Trivial. In Vincent Hendricks (ed.), Synthese volume.
Berit Brogaard & Joe Salerno (2013). Remarks on Counterpossibles. Synthese 190 (4):639-660.
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