Abstract
I defend the truthmaker approach to counterfactuals against certain objections that Andrew Bacon has made in his paper.
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Notes
- 1.
My response to Ondrej Majer, Vít Punčochář and Igor Sedlár also contains some discussion of the truthmaker semantics for counterfactuals.
- 2.
Bacon points out that Restricted Transitivity follows from the other finitary assumptions (Sect. 3.4) although, of course, someone who rejects some of those other assumptions may still wish to accept Restricted Transitivity.
- 3.
There is a slight problem with his formulation of the theorem. For the substitution principles that he gives are for the whole antecedent of a counterfactual and yet his proof requires that we make the substitutions within the antecedent. To rectify this problem, we cannot say that equivalents can always be substituted within an antecedent since we do not want the antecedent \(\neg ({\text{A}} \wedge ({\text{B}} \vee {\text{C}}))\) to be inter-substitutable with \(\neg (({\text{A}} \wedge {\text{B}}) \vee ({\text{A}} \wedge {\text{C}}))\). Perhaps the simplest fix is to extend the above rules of substitution by allowing that A ≈ A and that \({\text{A}} \vee {\text{B}} \approx {\text{A}}^{\prime } \vee {\text{B}}^{\prime }\) and A ∧ B ≈ Aʹ ∧ Bʹ whenever \({\text{A}} \approx {\text{A}}^{\prime } {\text{ and B}} \approx {\text{B}}^{\prime }\)
- 4.
I should also point out that, when writing Fine (2012a), I did not take seriously the possibility that a counterfactual with an impossible antecedent might be false. If this possibility is taken into account, then even the weak form of Disjunction might fail within the present context.
- 5.
There is also a brief discussion of the issue at the end of Sect. 7 of Fine (2018a).
- 6.
Some of the more general logical issues involved in not accepting Idempotence for conjunction are discussed in my response to Rothschild and Yablo.
- 7.
This issue, though in connection with conditional imperatives rather than counterfactuals, is discussed in Fine (2022).
- 8.
This is a large question and is also briefly discussed in the introduction to Fine (2018a). It is interesting to note, in this regard, that even such a keen advocate of the possible worlds approach as Stalnaker was willing to posit an impossible world in order to simplify the formulation of his semantics for the counterfactual in Stalnaker (1968, p. 34).
- 9.
I should add that it is also possible to piggy back the models of truthmaker semantics off of the models of the possible worlds semantics, as pointed out in Fine (2018b, 241–242), so that, in regard to the issue of intelligibility, there is no need ‘to go beyond the ontological or conceptual resources of the possible worlds semantics’.
- 10.
I shall not give details but the reader might like to bear in mind that the validity of Restricted Transitivity under the proposed semantics will turn on acceptance of the following condition on the transition relation (Fine 2012b, p. 240):
Incorporation If t → w u and uʹ ⊑ u then t ⊔ uʹ → w u.
- 11.
Not strictly a logical contradiction since there is no logical contradiction in my choosing m and n utiles for distinct m and n. But the puzzle is easily reformulated so as to result in as logical contradiction at this point in the argument.
- 12.
He cites Goldstein (2020) in support of his position (fn. 42). But Goldstein’s paper does not consider the kind of semantics typified by truthmaker semantics, which, in fact, is also able to provide an easy explanation of the phenomena—as in the paper, Anglberger et al., (2016), which Bacon also cites.
- 13.
- 14.
Of course, this might seem a little ad hoc and what we must do in general when the counterfactual consequences of an antecedent are not determinate is to consider all of its maximally possible consequences.
- 15.
Interesting questions arise when some of the actions a1, a2, …, an are allowed to be the same. This is a case, I believe, in which it may be helpful to have a semantics for disjunction, of the sort mentioned in footnote 3, which takes into account how many times a statement is made true by a given truth-maker.
References
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Fine, K. (2023). ‘Defense of a Truthmaker Approach to Counterfactuals’: Response to Andrew Bacon’s ‘Counterfactuals, Infinity and Paradox’. In: Faroldi, F.L.G., Van De Putte, F. (eds) Kit Fine on Truthmakers, Relevance, and Non-classical Logic. Outstanding Contributions to Logic, vol 26. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29415-0_18
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