This paper presents a drastically revised version of the theory of causality, based on analyses of causal processes and causal interactions, advocated in Salmon (1984). Relying heavily on modified versions of proposals by P. Dowe, this article answers penetrating objections by Dowe and P. Kitcher to the earlier theory. It shows how the new theory circumvents a host of difficulties that have been raised in the literature. The result is, I hope, a more satisfactory analysis of physical causality.

“If the tower is any taller than 320 ms, it may collapse,” Eiffel thinks out loud. Although understanding this counterfactual poses no trouble, the most successful interventionist semantics struggle to model it because the antecedent can come about in infinitely many ways. My aim is to provide a semantics that will make modeling such counterfactuals easy for philosophers, computer scientists, and cognitive scientists who work on causation and causal reasoning. I first propose three desiderata that will guide my theory: (...) it should be general, yet conservative, yet useful. Next, I develop a formalization of events in the form of an algebra. I identify an event with all the ways in which it can be brought about and provide rules for determining the referent of an arbitrary event description. I apply this algebra to counterfactuals expressed using underdeterministic causal models-models that encode non-probabilistic causal indeterminacies. Specifically, I develop semaphore interventions, which represent how the target system may be modified from without in a coordinated fashion. This, in turn, allows me to bring about any event within a single model. Finally, I explain the advantages of this semantics over other interventionist competitors. (shrink)

Metaphysical modalities are definable from counterfactual conditionals, and the epistemology of the former is a special case of the epistemology of the latter. In particular, the role of conceivability and inconceivability in assessing claims of possibility and impossibility can be explained as a special case of the pervasive role of the imagination in assessing counterfactual conditionals, an account of which is sketched. Thus scepticism about metaphysical modality entails a more far-reaching scepticism about counterfactuals. The account is used to question (...) the significance of the distinction between a priori and a posteriori knowledge. (shrink)

In ordinary language, in the medical sciences, and in the overlap between them, we frequently make claims which imply that we might have had different gametic origins from the ones we actually have. Such statements seem intuitively true and coherent. But they counterfactually ascribe different DNA to their referents and therefore contradict material-origin essentialism, which Kripke and his followers argue is intuitively obvious. In this paper I argue, using examples from ordinary language and from philosophy of medicine and bioethics, that (...) statements which attribute alternative material origins to their referents are useful, common in political and medical reasoning, and in many cases best interpreted literally. So we must replace the doctrine of material-origin essentialism with one that can make sense of ordinary discourse and the language of the medical sciences. I propose an anti-essentialist account of such counterfactuals according to which individuals’ modal properties are relative to a given inquiry. (shrink)

Consider the reasonable axioms of subjunctive conditionals if p → q1 and p → q2 at some world, then p → at that world, and if p1 → q and p2 → q at some world, then → q at that world, where p → q is the subjunctive conditional. I show that a Lewis-style semantics for subjunctive conditionals satisfies these axioms if and only if one makes a certain technical assumption about the closeness relation, an assumption that is probably (...) false. I will then show how Lewisian semantics can be modified so as to assure and even when the technical assumption fails, and in fact in one sense the semantics actually becomes simpler then. (shrink)

I consider a puzzling case presented by Jose Benardete, and by appeal to this case develop a paradox involving counterfactual conditionals. I then show that this paradox may be leveraged to argue for certain non-obvious claims concerning the logic of counterfactuals.

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 and his theory of laws of nature.

Counterfactuals are typically thought--given the force of Sobel sequences--to be variably strict conditionals. I go the other way. Sobel sequences and (what I call) Hegel sequences push us to a strict conditional analysis of counterfactuals: counterfactuals amount to some necessity modal scoped over a plain material conditional, just which modal being a function of context. To make this worth saying I need to say just how counterfactuals and context interact. No easy feat, but I have something (...) to say on the matter. (shrink)

General relativity poses serious problems for counterfactual propositions peculiar to it as a physical theory. Because these problems arise solely from the dynamical nature of spacetime geometry, they are shared by all schools of thought on how counterfactuals should be interpreted and understood. Given the role of counterfactuals in the characterization of, inter alia, many accounts of scientific laws, theory confirmation and causation, general relativity once again presents us with idiosyncratic puzzles any attempt to analyze and understand the (...) nature of scientific knowledge must face. (shrink)

In a recent paper Lee Walters criticizes a number of philosophers – including Gundersen – for committing a ‘failure in the argumentative strategy’ when they attempt to amend the standard Lewis semantics for counterfactuals in order to avoid the so‐called principle of Conjunction Conditionalization. In this article we defend a Gundersen‐style probability‐based semantics against Walter's major misgivings: that it is not logically conservative, that it is committed to the Connection Hypothesis, and that it cannot deal satisfactory with irrelevant semi‐factuals.

Bertrand Russell’s celebrated essay “On the Notion of Cause” was first delivered to the Aristotelian Society on 4 November 1912, as Russell’s Presidential Address. The piece is best known for a passage in which its author deftly positions himself between the traditional metaphysics of causation and the British crown, firing broadsides in both directions: “The law of causality”, Russell declares, “Like much that passes muster in philosophy, is a relic of a bygone age, surviving, like the monarchy, only because it (...) is erroneously supposed to do no harm.” To mark the lecture’s centenary, I offer a contemporary view of the issues Russell here puts on the table, and of the health or otherwise, at the end of the essay’s first century, of his notorious conclusion. (shrink)

I argue that most counterfactuals are false.

This paper is an answer to the preceding paper by Kastner, in which she continued the criticism of the counterfactual usage of the Aharonov-Bergman-Lebowitz rule in the framework of the time-symmetrized quantum theory, in particular, by analyzing the three-box “paradox.” It is argued that the criticism is not sound. Paradoxical features of the three-box example are discussed. It is explained that the elements of reality in the framework of time-symmetrized quantum theory are counterfactual statements, and therefore, even conflicting elements of (...) reality can be associated with a single system. It is shown how such “counterfactual” elements of reality can be useful in the analysis of a physical experiment (the three-box example). The validity of Kastner's application of the consistent histories approach to the time-symmetrized counterfactuals is questioned. (shrink)

Moritz Schulz explores counterfactual thought and language: what would have happened if things had gone a different way. Counterfactual questions may concern large scale derivations or small scale evaluations of minor derivations. A common impression, which receives a thorough defence in the book, is that oftentimes we find it impossible to know what would have happened. However, this does not mean that we are completely at a loss: we are typically capable of evaluating counterfactual questions probabilistically: we can say what (...) would have been likely or unlikely to happen. Schulz describes these probabilistic ways of evaluating counterfactual questions and turns the data into a novel account of the workings of counterfactual thought. (shrink)

The counterfactual comparative account of harm has emerged as the main contender in the recent literature on the nature of harm. But Erik Carlson argues that the account violates plausible normative principles connecting harm with our reasons to perform certain actions and to prefer certain outcomes. According to Carlson, the account implies that we have reason to perform actions and to prefer outcomes that we do not in fact possess. This paper defends the counterfactual comparative account from these objections.

In this paper, I defend an updated account of functional kinds, initially presented by Daniel Weiskopf, from the criticism that functional kinds will not qualify as scientific kinds. An important part of Weiskopf’s account is that functional kinds are multiply realisable. The criticisms I consider avoid discussion of multiple realisability. Instead, it is argued that functional kinds carry inferior counterfactual profiles when compared to other accounts of kinds. I respond to this charge by arguing that this criticism fails to take (...) into consideration the role that multiple realisability can play in providing important explanatory counterfactuals. I do so by highlighting some points made by Lauren Ross that highlight where multiple realisability is explanatorily pertinent. I then argue that the criticisms of Weiskopf’s account fail to establish the explanatory inferiority of functional kinds. (shrink)

The paper focuses on a recent challenge brought forward against the interventionist approach to the meaning of counterfactual conditionals. According to this objection, interventionism cannot account for the interpretation of right-nested counterfactuals, the problem being its strict interventionism. We will report on the results of an empirical study supporting the objection. Furthermore, we will extend the well-known logic of intervention with a new operator expressing an alternative notion of intervention that does away with strict interventionism. This new notion of (...) intervention operates on the valuation of the variables in a causal model, and not on their functional dependencies. (shrink)

Ex ante predicted outcomes should be interpreted as counterfactuals (potential histories), with errors as the spread between outcomes. But error rates have error rates. We reapply measurements of uncertainty about the estimation errors of the estimation errors of an estimation treated as branching counterfactuals. Such recursions of epistemic uncertainty have markedly different distributial properties from conventional sampling error, and lead to fatter tails in the projections than in past realizations. Counterfactuals of error rates always lead to fat (...) tails, regardless of the probability distribution used. A mere .01% branching error rate about the STD (itself an error rate), and .01% branching error rate about that error rate, etc. (recursing all the way) results in explosive (and infinite) moments higher than 1. Missing any degree of regress leads to the underestimation of small probabilities and concave payoffs (a standard example of which is Fukushima). The paper states the conditions under which higher order rates of uncertainty (expressed in spreads of counterfactuals) alters the shapes the of final distribution and shows which a priori beliefs about conterfactuals are needed to accept the reliability of conventional probabilistic methods (thin tails or mildly fat tails). (shrink)

Counterfactual conditionals have been appealed to in various ways to show how the mind can be causally efficacious. However, it has often been overestimated what the truth of certain counterfactuals actually indicates about causation. The paper first identifies four approaches that seem to commit precisely this mistake. The arguments discussed involve erroneous assumptions about the connection of counterfactual dependence and genuine causation, as well as a disregard of the requisite evaluation conditions of counterfactuals. In a second step, the (...) paper uses the insights of the foregoing analyses to formulate a set of counterfactuals-based conditions that are characterized as sufficient to establish singular causal claims. The paper concludes that there are ample reasons to believe that some mental events satisfy all these conditions with respect to certain further events and, hence, that mental events sometimes are causes. (shrink)

I focus on the commonly shared view that Hume’s monetary theory is inconsistent. I review several attempts to solve the alleged inconsistency in Hume’s monetary theory, including the consensus interpretation according to which Hume was committed to the neutrality of money only in the long run, while he conceded that money can be non-neutral in the short run. Then, building on a monetary version of the logical fallacy of monotonic counterfactuals in the essay Of the Balance of Trade, I (...) argue for the consistency of Hume’s theory of money by ascribing to Hume a distinction between money as collectively neutral and distributively non-neutral. (shrink)

RÉSUMÉ: Je me demande ici si les conceptions pragmatiques de la vérité peuvent être réconciliées avec les intuitions ordinaires quant à la portée de la bivalence. Je soutiens que les pragmatistes sont conduits à accepter une distinction du genre «type/occurrence» entre les formes d’une investigation et ses instanciations particulières, sous peine de banaliser leur vérificationnisme. Néanmoins, même la conception révisée que j’examine échoue à sauver les approches épistémiques de la vérité de certaines conséquences peu plausibles.

In Lange 2004a, I argued that 'scientific essentialism' [Ellis 2001 cannot account for the characteristic relation between laws and counterfactuals without undergoing considerable ad hoc tinkering. In recent papers, Brian Ellis 2005 and Toby Handfield 2005 have defended essentialism against my charge. Here I argue that Ellis's and Handfield's replies fail. Even in ordinary counterfactual reasoning, the 'closest possible world' where the electron's electric charge is 5% greater may have less overlap with the actual world in its fundamental natural (...) kinds than a 'more distant possible world' where the electron's charge is 5% greater. But more importantly, essentialism's flexibility in being able to accommodate virtually any relation between laws and counterfactuals is a symptom of essentialism's explanatory impotence as far as that relation is concerned. (shrink)

In the eleventh chapter of Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus says to the inhabitants of Bethsaida and Corozain: “If the miracles worked in you had taken place in Tyre and Sidon, they would have repented long ago in sackcloth and ashes”. Passages like this support a scriptural argument for God’s knowledge of counterfactuals about created individuals. In the sixteenth century, Jesuits and Dominicans vigorously debated about how to explain this knowledge. The Jesuits, notably Luis de Molina and Francisco Suarez, argued that (...) the basis for this knowledge lies primarily in the divine intellect: counterfactuals about free creatures are primitive truths known to God by virtue of the immensity of his intellectual power. Their Dominican opponents, notably Domingo Bañez and Diego Alvarez, held that this knowledge is simply God’s knowledge of his own decrees, by which he determines the truth value of all contingent propositions, including counterfactuals. (shrink)