The article is a criticism of john watling's argument about contrary-To-Fact conditionals. The author states: "a conditional which is contrary-To-Fact does not enable us in any way to decide which statements... Are empirical and which are analytic." (staff).

The author criticizes pear's use of the notion of material implication in his explanation of contrary-To-Fact conditionals. The author attempts to show that universal material implications "have no relevance to contrary-To-Fact conditionals." (staff).

I WANT TO EXPLORE in this paper the relationship between ethical decisions, possible worlds, and certain types of emotions that Moravscik has called "Platonic attitudes." I will argue that what constitutes reflection in ethical decision-making involves imagining the possible world of another entity, a world that is contingent on an action that we have the power to perform. Ethical counterfactuals posit materially possible worlds or logically possible worlds and in both cases always include an affective element. That is, along with (...) imagining the properties of a projected world, an ethical counterfactual incorporates a realization of how that world would be experienced. I will argue below that the affective element is present even in deontology. Both the emotional factor and the future orientation of the possibilities distinguish ethical counterfactuals from the purely epistemic possible worlds discussed by Kripke and others. We can make a further distinction between types of emotions and utilize Moravscik's point that emotional states based on properties that can be rationally spelled out possess special characteristics. One of these characteristics is that these states, and only these, serve as focal points for imagining the possible world of another person. (shrink)

Consider Dretske's measles example (from page 74 in his Knowldege and the Flow of Information (MIT/Bradford: 1981) ): since the question of whether Alice's being one of Herman's children carries the information that she has the measles is a question about conditional probabilities, we must be careful about our specification of the condition, the antecedent. Although we are to suppose that it is a true generalization that all of Herman's children have the measles, since that is a coincidence, we (...) can just as well suppose that Alice is an only child with the measles. It is of course true that the conditional probability of Alice's having measles given that she has the measles is 1; but that is not relevant to the question Dretske raises. In Dretske's example, the question is whether Alice's being Herman's child carries the information that she has measles. And so the relevant condition in this example is simply Alice's being Herman's child. While it is in fact true that Alice has the measles, that isn't part of the condition: for the question is, "how probable is the one state of affairs given some other state of affairs,". (shrink)

A contrary-to-duty obligation is an obligation telling us what ought to be the case if something that is wrong is true. For example: ‘If you have done something bad, you should make amends’. Doing something bad is wrong, but if it is true that you did do something bad, it ought to be the case that you make amends. Here are some other examples: ‘If he is guilty, he should confess’, ‘If you have hurt your friend, you should apologise (...) to her’, ‘If she will not keep her promise to him, she ought to call him’, ‘If the books are not returned by the due date, you must pay a fine’. Alternatively, we might say that a contrary-to-duty obligation is a conditional obligation where the condition (in the obligation) is forbidden, or where the condition is fulfilled only if a primary obligation is violated. In the first example, he should not be guilty; but if he is, he should confess. You should not have hurt your friend; but if you have, you should apologise. She should keep her promise to him; but if she will not, she ought to call him. The books ought to be returned by the due date; but if they are not, you must pay a fine. -/- Contrary-to-duty obligations are important in our moral and legal thinking. They turn up in discussions concerning guilt, blame, confession, restoration, reparation, punishment, repentance, retributive justice, compensation, apologies, damage control, and so forth. The rationale of a contrary-to-duty obligation is the fact that most of us do neglect our primary duties from time to time and yet it is reasonable to believe that we should make the best of a bad situation, or at least that it matters what we do when this is the case. -/- We want to find an adequate symbolisation of such obligations in some logical system. However, it has turned out to be difficult to do that. This is shown by the so-called contrary-to-duty (obligation) paradox, sometimes called the contrary-to-duty imperative paradox. The contrary-to-duty paradox arises when we try to formalise certain intuitively consistent sets of ordinary language sentences, sets that include at least one contrary-to-duty obligation sentence, by means of ordinary counterparts available in various monadic deontic logics, such as the so-called Standard Deontic Logic and similar systems. In many of these systems the resulting sets are inconsistent in the sense that it is possible to deduce contradictions from them, or else they violate some other intuitively plausible condition, for example that the members of the sets should be independent of each other. This article discusses this paradox and some solutions that have been suggested in the literature. -/- (Submitted: 2017-10-23; Published in 2022). (shrink)

We consider conditionals of the form A ⇒ B where A depends on the future and B on the present and past. We examine models for such conditional arising in Talmudic legal cases. We call such conditionals contrary to time conditionals.Three main aspects will be investigated: Inverse causality from future to past, where a future condition can influence a legal event in the past (this is a man made causality).Comparison with similar features in modern law.New types of temporal (...) logics arising from modelling the Talmudic examples. We shall see that we need a new temporal logic,which we call Talmudic temporal logic with linear open advancing future and parallel changing past, based on two parameters for time. (shrink)

Many creative historiographers have claimed, And continue to claim, That they can have no serious and professional concern with what was not, Yet might have been. Yet this claim is demonstrably mistaken. For historians, If not mere annalists, As such are and have to be concerned with causes; and any claim that this was (even) the (part) cause of that necessarily and always carries implications about the contrary-To-Fact.

Mackie, J. L. Causes and conditions.--Taylor, R. The metaphysics of causation.--Scriven, M. Defects of the necessary condition analysis of causation.--Kim, J. Causes and events: Mackie on causation.--Anscombe, G. E. M. Causality and determination.--Davidson, D. Causal relations.--Wright, G. H. von. On the logic and epistemology of the causal relation.--Ducasse, C. J. On the nature and the observability of the causal relation.--Sellars, W. S. Counterfactuals.--Chisholm, R. M. Law statements and counterfactual inference.--Rescher, N. Belief-contravening suppositions and the problem of contrary-to-fact conditionals.--Stalnaker, (...) R. A theory of conditionals.--Lewis, D. Causation.--Kim, J. Causes and counterfactuals. (shrink)

The paper examines the nature of the social fact in social knowledge on the background of the differences between sciences and social sciences. The approach applied is historical , as well as one based on differentiating between Humean conception of fact and the conceptions, in which facts are seen as determining the truth values of our propositions. Underlined are the intentionality and structure of social facts in terms of Searle’s construction of the social as well as the weakness (...) of his conception. In conclusion it is asserted that the construction of facts in social sciences is impossible without psychological vocabulary and concepts, whose contents are conceived – contrary to Searle’s internalism – in terms of externalism. (shrink)

Making sense of our reasoning in disputes about necessary truths requires admitting nonvacuous counterpossibles. One class of these is the counteressentials, which ask us to make contrary to fact suppositions about essences. A popular strategy in accounting for nonvacuous counterpossibles is to extend the standard possible worlds semantics for subjunctive conditionals by the addition of impossible worlds. A conditional A □-> C is then taken to be true if all of the nearest A worlds are C worlds. (...) I argue that a straightforward extension of the standard possible worlds semantics to impossible worlds does not result in a viable account of counteressentials and propose an alternative covering law semantics for counteressentials. (shrink)

In all cases, the problem concerns the proper meaning of subjunctive and counterfactual conditionals. For present purposes, a conditional sentence is one composed of at least two clauses, the central connective of which is, or is understood to be, "if... then." A subjunctive conditional is a conditional sentence in which the clause following the "if," the antecedent, may be true or false, but in which the truth or falsity of the entire sentence does not depend upon the (...) truth or falsity of its two clauses, the antecedent and consequent. A contrary-to-fact conditional, or counterfactual sentence, is a subjunctive conditional sentence which implicitly asserts that the antecedent is false. An example of the subjunctive conditional is. (shrink)

While there has been much discussion about what makes some mathematical proofs more explanatory than others, and what are mathematical coincidences, in this article I explore the distinct phenomenon of mathematical facts that call for explanation. The existence of mathematical facts that call for explanation stands in tension with virtually all existing accounts of “calling for explanation”, which imply that necessary facts cannot call for explanation. In this paper I explore what theoretical revisions are needed in order to accommodate this (...) phenomenon. One of the important upshots is that, contrary to the current consensus, low prior probability is not a necessary condition for calling for explanation. In the final section I explain how the results of this inquiry help us make progress in assessing Hartry Field’s style of reliability argument against mathematical Platonism and against robust realism in other domains of necessary facts, such as ethics. (shrink)

We investigate under what conditions contrary-to-duty (CTD) structures lacking temporal and action elements can be given a coherent reading. We argue, contrary to some recent proposals, that CTD is not an instance of defeasible reasoning, and that methods of nonmonotonic logics are inadequate since they are unable to distinguish between defeasibility and violation of primary obligations. We propose a semantic framework based on the idea that primary and CTD obligations are obligations of different kinds: a CTD obligation pertains (...) to, or pre-supposes, a certain context in which a primary obligation is already violated. This framework is presented initially as an extension of Standard Deontic Logic (SDL), a normal modal logic of type KD, and is illustrated by application to a series of examples. The concluding section is concerned with some resemblances between CTD and defeasible reasoning. We show first that the SDL-based framework contains a flaw and must be adjusted. A discussion of possible adjustments, including an alternative treatment in terms of a preference-based semantics, reveals difficulties that are reminiscent of problems in defeasible reasoning and intensional accounts of defeasible conditionals. (shrink)

Contrary to popular philosophical belief, judgment can indeed be an intentional action. That's because an intentional judgment, even one with content p, need not be intentional as a judgment that p. It can instead be intentional just as a judgment wh- for some specific wh- question—e.g. a judgment of which x is F or a judgment whether p. This paper explains how this is possible by laying out a means by which you can perform such an intentional action. This (...) model of intentional judgment does not stand in tension with the fact that judgment is causally regulated for truth, and that it is correct only if it is true. On the contrary, the structure of intentional action explains how an intentional judgment has these features. An extended example is developed, and sufficient conditions on intentional judgment are laid out. (shrink)

Two experiments were conducted to show that the IF … THEN … rules used in the different versions of Wason 's selection task are not psychologically—though they are logically—equivalent. Some of these rules are considered by the participants as strict logical conditionals, whereas others are interpreted as expressing a biconditional relationship. A deductive task was used jointly with the selection task to show that the original abstract rule is quite ambiguous in this respect, contrary to deontic rules: the typical (...) “error” made by most people may indeed be explained by the fact that they consider the abstract rule as a biconditional. Thus, there is no proper error or bias in the selection task as it is still argued, but a differential interpretation of the rule. The need for taking into account a pragmatic component in the process of reasoning is illustrated by the experiments. (shrink)

This article presents a fundamental advance in the theory of mental models as an explanation of reasoning about facts, possibilities, and probabilities. It postulates that the meanings of compound assertions, such as conditionals (if) and disjunctions (or), unlike those in logic, refer to conjunctions of epistemic possibilities that hold in default of information to the contrary. Various factors such as general knowledge can modulate these interpretations. New information can always override sentential inferences; that is, reasoning in daily life is (...) defeasible (or nonmonotonic). The theory is a dual process one: It distinguishes between intuitive inferences (based on system 1) and deliberative inferences (based on system 2). The article describes a computer implementation of the theory, including its two systems of reasoning, and it shows how the program simulates crucial predictions that evidence corroborates. It concludes with a discussion of how the theory contrasts with those based on logic or on probabilities. (shrink)

In this paper a formalized logic of propositions, PA1, is presented. It is proven consistent and its relationships to traditional logic, to PM ([15]), to subjunctive (including contrary-to-fact) implication and to the “paradoxes” of material and strict implication are developed. Apart from any intrinsic merit it possesses, its chief significance lies in demonstrating the feasibility of a general logic containing theprinciple of subjunctive contrariety, i.e., the principle that ‘Ifpwere true thenqwould be true’ and ‘Ifpwere true thenqwould be false’ (...) are incompatible. (shrink)

This paper provides an analysis of contrary-to-duty reasoning from the proof-theoretical perspective of category theory. While Chisholm’s paradox hints at the need of dyadic deontic logic by showing that monadic deontic logics are not able to adequately model conditional obligations and contrary-to-duties, other arguments can be objected to dyadic approaches in favor of non-monotonic foundations. We show that all these objections can be answered at one fell swoop by modeling conditional obligations within a deductive system defined (...) as an instance of a symmetric monoidal closed category. Using category theory as a foundational framework for logic, we show that it is possible to model conditional normative reasoning and conflicting obligations within a monadic approach without adding further operators or considering deontic conditionals as primitive. (shrink)

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.