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Embedded counterfactuals and possible worlds semantics

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Abstract

Stephen Barker argues that a possible worlds semantics for the counterfactual conditional of the sort proposed by Stalnaker and Lewis cannot accommodate certain examples in which determinism is true and a counterfactual Q > R is false, but where, for some P, the compound counterfactual P > (Q > R) is true. I argue that the completeness theorem for Lewis’s system VC of counterfactual logic shows that Stalnaker–Lewis semantics does accommodate Barker’s example, and I argue that its doing so should be understood as showing that the example is an exception to Lewis’s Time’s Arrow requirements.

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References

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Acknowledgments

I am grateful to the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy for funding a research visit during which I presented a version of this paper.

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Correspondence to Charles B. Cross.

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Cross, C.B. Embedded counterfactuals and possible worlds semantics. Philos Stud 173, 665–673 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-015-0512-3

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