Results for 'Counterfactuals'

1000+ found
Order:
  1. Counterfactuals.David K. Lewis - 1973 - Malden, Mass.: Blackwell.
    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.
  2. Counterfactual Attitudes and Multi-Centered Worlds.Dilip Ninan - 2012 - Semantics and Pragmatics 5 (5):1-57.
    Counterfactual attitudes like imagining, dreaming, and wishing create a problem for the standard formal semantic theory of de re attitude ascriptions. I show how the problem can be avoided if we represent an agent's attitudinal possibilities using "multi-centered worlds", possible worlds with multiple distinguished individuals, each of which represents an individual with whom the agent is acquainted. I then present a compositional semantics for de re ascriptions according to which singular terms are "assignment-sensitive" expressions and attitude verbs are "assignment shifters".
    Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   39 citations  
  3. Most Counterfactuals Are False.Alan Hajek - 2014
  4. Counterfactual Desirability.Richard Bradley & H. Orii Stefansson - 2017 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 68 (2):485-533.
    The desirability of what actually occurs is often influenced by what could have been. Preferences based on such value dependencies between actual and counterfactual outcomes generate a class of problems for orthodox decision theory, the best-known perhaps being the so-called Allais Paradox. In this paper we solve these problems by extending Richard Jeffrey's decision theory to counterfactual prospects, using a multidimensional possible-world semantics for conditionals, and showing that preferences that are sensitive to counterfactual considerations can still be desirability maximising. We (...)
    Direct download (10 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   15 citations  
  5. Counterfactuals and causation: history, problems, and prospects.John Collins, Ned Hall & L. A. Paul - 2004 - In John Collins, Ned Hall & Laurie Paul (eds.), Causation and Counterfactuals. MIT Press. pp. 1--57.
    Among the many philosophers who hold that causal facts1 are to be explained in terms of—or more ambitiously, shown to reduce to—facts about what happens, together with facts about the fundamental laws that govern what happens, the clear favorite is an approach that sees counterfactual dependence as the key to such explanation or reduction. The paradigm examples of causation, so advocates of this approach tell us, are examples in which events c and e— the cause and its effect— both occur, (...)
    Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   62 citations  
  6. Causal Counterfactuals and Impossible Worlds.Daniel Nolan - 2017 - In Helen Beebee, Christopher Hitchcock & Huw Price (eds.), Making a Difference. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. pp. 14-32.
    A standing challenge in the theory of counterfactuals is to solve the “deviation problem”. Consider ordinary counterfactuals involving an antecedent concerning a difference from the actual course of events at a particular time, and a consequent concerning, at least in part, what happens at a later time. In the possible worlds framework, the problem is often put in terms of which are the relevant antecedent worlds. Desiderata for the solution include that the relevant antecedent worlds be governed by (...)
    Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   6 citations  
  7. Counterfactual Probability.Ginger Schultheis - forthcoming - Journal of Philosophy.
    Stalnaker's Thesis about indicative conditionals is, roughly, that the probability one ought to assign to an indicative conditional equals the probability that one ought to assign to its consequent conditional on its antecedent. The thesis seems right. If you draw a card from a standard 52-card deck, how confident are you that the card is a diamond if it's a red card? To answer this, you calculate the proportion of red cards that are diamonds -- that is, you calculate the (...)
    Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   5 citations  
  8.  47
    Counterfactual Thinking: Function and Dysfunction.Keith Markman, Figen Karadogan, Matthew Lindberg & Ethan Zell - 2009 - In Keith Markman, William Klein & Julie Suhr (eds.), Handbook of Imagination and Mental Simulation. New York City, New York, USA: Psychology Press. pp. 175-194.
    Counterfactual thinking—the capacity to reflect on what would, could, or should have been if events had transpired differently—is a pervasive, yet seemingly paradoxical human tendency. On the one hand, counterfactual thoughts can be comforting and inspiring (Carroll & Shepperd, Chapter 28), but on the other they can be anxiety provoking and depressing (Zeelenberg & Pieters, Chapter 27). Likewise, such thoughts can illuminate pathways toward better future outcomes (Wong, Galinsky, & Kray, Chapter 11), yet they can also promote confusion and lead (...)
    Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  9. Counterfactuals, Dispositions, and the Causal Modalities.Wilfrid Sellars - 1957 - In Herbert Feigl Michael Scriven & Grover Maxwell (eds.), Minnesota Studies in The Philosophy of Science, Vol. II. University of Minnesota Press.
    [p.225] Introduction (i) Although the following essay attempts to deal in a connected way with a number of connected conceptual tangles, it is by no means monolithic in design. It divides roughly in two, with the first half (Parts I and II) devoted to certain puzzles which have their source in a misunderstanding of the more specific structure of the language in which we describe and explain natural phenomena; while the second half (Parts III and IV) attempts to resolve the (...)
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   39 citations  
  10. Counterfactuals, Dispositions, and the Causal Modalities.Wilfrid Sellars - 1952 - University of Minnesota.
    No categories
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   34 citations  
  11. Counterfactual scorekeeping.Anthony S. Gillies - 2007 - Linguistics and Philosophy 30 (3):329 - 360.
    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 (...)
    Direct download (4 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   102 citations  
  12. Mechanisms, counterfactuals and laws.Stavros Ioannidis & Stathis Psillos - 2018 - In Stuart Glennan & Phyllis Illari (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Mechanisms and Mechanical Philosophy. Routledge. pp. 144-156.
    In this chapter we examine the relation between mechanisms and laws/counterfactuals by revisiting the main notions of mechanism found in the literature. We distinguish between two different conceptions of ‘mechanism’: mechanisms-of underlie or constitute a causal process; mechanisms-for are complex systems that function so as to produce a certain behavior. According to some mechanists, a mechanism fulfills both of these roles simultaneously. The main argument of the chapter is that there is an asymmetrical dependence between both kinds of mechanisms (...)
    Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  13. Interventionist counterfactuals.Rachael Briggs - 2012 - Philosophical Studies 160 (1):139-166.
    A number of recent authors (Galles and Pearl, Found Sci 3 (1):151–182, 1998; Hiddleston, Noûs 39 (4):232–257, 2005; Halpern, J Artif Intell Res 12:317–337, 2000) advocate a causal modeling semantics for counterfactuals. But the precise logical significance of the causal modeling semantics remains murky. Particularly important, yet particularly under-explored, is its relationship to the similarity-based semantics for counterfactuals developed by Lewis (Counterfactuals. Harvard University Press, 1973b). The causal modeling semantics is both an account of the truth conditions (...)
    Direct download (4 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   90 citations  
  14. Counterfactuals and the Epistemology of Modality.Thomas Kroedel - 2012 - Philosophers' Imprint 12.
    The paper provides an explanation of our knowledge of metaphysical modality, or modal knowledge, from our ability to evaluate counterfactual conditionals. The latter ability lends itself to an evolutionary explanation since it enables us to learn from mistakes. Different logical principles linking counterfactuals to metaphysical modality can be employed to extend this explanation to the epistemology of modality. While the epistemological use of some of these principles is either philosophically implausible or empirically inadequate, the equivalence of ‘Necessarily p’ with (...)
    Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   24 citations  
  15. Against Counterfactual Miracles.Cian Dorr - 2016 - Philosophical Review 125 (2):241-286.
    This paper considers how counterfactuals should be evaluated on the assumption that determinism is true. I argue against Lewis's influential view that the actual laws of nature would have been false if something had happened that never actually happened, and in favour of the competing view that history would have been different all the way back. I argue that we can do adequate justice to our ordinary practice of relying on a wide range of historical truths in evaluating (...) by saying that, in typical cases, history would have been only *very slightly* different until shortly before the relevant time. The paper also draws some connections between the puzzle about counterfactuals under determinism and the debate about whether determinism entails that no-one can ever do otherwise than they in fact do. (shrink)
    Direct download (8 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   35 citations  
  16. Presupposing Counterfactuality.Julia Zakkou - 2019 - Semantics and Pragmatics 12.
    There is long standing agreement both among philosophers and linguists that the term ‘counterfactual conditional’ is misleading if not a misnomer. Speakers of both non-past subjunctive (or ‘would’) conditionals and past subjunctive (or ‘would have’) conditionals need not convey counterfactuality. The relationship between the conditionals in question and the counterfactuality of their antecedents is thus not one of presupposing. It is one of conversationally implicating. This paper provides a thorough examination of the arguments against the presupposition view as applied to (...)
    Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   5 citations  
  17.  28
    Counterfactual Plausibility and Comparative Similarity.L. Stanley Matthew, W. Stewart Gregory & Brigard Felipe De - 2017 - Cognitive Science 41 (S5):1216-1228.
    Counterfactual thinking involves imagining hypothetical alternatives to reality. Philosopher David Lewis argued that people estimate the subjective plausibility that a counterfactual event might have occurred by comparing an imagined possible world in which the counterfactual statement is true against the current, actual world in which the counterfactual statement is false. Accordingly, counterfactuals considered to be true in possible worlds comparatively more similar to ours are judged as more plausible than counterfactuals deemed true in possible worlds comparatively less similar. (...)
    Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   7 citations  
  18. Counterfactuals, correlatives, and disjunction.Luis Alonso-Ovalle - 2009 - Linguistics and Philosophy 32 (2):207-244.
    The natural interpretation of counterfactuals with disjunctive antecedents involves selecting from each of the disjuncts the worlds that come closest to the world of evaluation. It has been long noticed that capturing this interpretation poses a problem for a minimal change semantics for counterfactuals, because selecting the closest worlds from each disjunct requires accessing the denotation of the disjuncts from the denotation of the disjunctive antecedent, which the standard boolean analysis of or does not allow (Creary and Hill, (...)
    Direct download (6 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   30 citations  
  19. Counterfactual theories of causation.Peter Menzies - 2008 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    The basic idea of counterfactual theories of causation is that the meaning of causal claims can be explained in terms of counterfactual conditionals of the form “If A had not occurred, C would not have occurred”. While counterfactual analyses have been given of type-causal concepts, most counterfactual analyses have focused on singular causal or token-causal claims of the form “event c caused event e”. Analyses of token-causation have become popular in the last thirty years, especially since the development in the (...)
    Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   66 citations  
  20. Counterfactual Logic and the Necessity of Mathematics.Samuel Elgin - manuscript
    This paper is concerned with counterfactual logic and its implications for the modal status of mathematical claims. It is most directly a response to an ambitious program by Yli-Vakkuri and Hawthorne (2018), who seek to establish that mathematics is committed to its own necessity. I claim that their argument fails to establish this result for two reasons. First, their assumptions force our hand on a controversial debate within counterfactual logic. In particular, they license counterfactual strengthening— the inference from ‘If A (...)
    Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  21. Mathematical counterfactuals with number-theoretic antecedents and extra-mathematical explanation.Lars Arthur Tump - 2021 - Logique Et Analyse 254:191-213.
    A proposal by Baron, Colyvan, and Ripley to extend the counterfactual theory of explanation to include counterfactual reasoning about mathematical explanations of physical facts is discussed. Their suggestion is that the explanatory role of mathematics can best be captured counterfactually. This paper focuses on their example with a number-theoretic antecedent. Incorporating discussions on the structure and de re knowledge of numbers, it is argued that the approach leads to a change in the structure of numbers. As a result, the counterfactual (...)
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  22. Counterfactual reasoning.Roberta Ferrario - 2001 - In P. Bouquet V. Akman (ed.), Modeling and Using Context. Springer. pp. 170--183.
    Primary goal of this paper is to show that counterfactual reasoning, as many other kinds of common sense reasoning, can be studied and analyzed through what we can call a cognitive approach, that represents knowledge as structured and partitioned into different domains, everyone of which has a specific theory, but can exchange data and information with some of the others. Along these lines, we are going to show that a kind of ``counterfactual attitude'' is pervasive in a lot of forms (...)
    Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  23. Counterfactual Similarity, Nomic Indiscernibility, and the Paradox of Quidditism.Andrew D. Bassford & C. Daniel Dolson - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
    Aristotle is essentially human; that is, for all possible worlds metaphysically consistent with our own, if Aristotle exists, then he is human. This is a claim about the essential property of an object. The claim that objects have essential properties has been hotly disputed, but for present purposes, we can bracket that issue. In this essay, we are interested, rather, in the question of whether properties themselves have essential properties (or features) for their existence. We call those who suppose they (...)
    Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  24.  47
    Counterfactual Thinking and Recency Effects in Causal Judgment.Paul Henne, Aleksandra Kulesza, Karla Perez & Augustana Houcek - manuscript
    People tend to judge more recent events, relative to earlier ones, as the cause of some particular outcome. For instance, people are more inclined to judge that the last basket, rather than the first, caused the team to win the basketball game. This recency effect, however, reverses in cases of overdetermination: people judge that earlier events, rather than more recent ones, caused the outcome when the event is individually sufficient but not individually necessary for the outcome. In five experiments (N (...)
    Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  25.  69
    Structural Counterfactuals: A Brief Introduction.Judea Pearl - 2013 - Cognitive Science 37 (6):977-985.
    Recent advances in causal reasoning have given rise to a computational model that emulates the process by which humans generate, evaluate, and distinguish counterfactual sentences. Contrasted with the “possible worlds” account of counterfactuals, this “structural” model enjoys the advantages of representational economy, algorithmic simplicity, and conceptual clarity. This introduction traces the emergence of the structural model and gives a panoramic view of several applications where counterfactual reasoning has benefited problem areas in the empirical sciences.
    Direct download (5 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   16 citations  
  26. Counterfactuals.David Lewis - 1973 - Foundations of Language 13 (1):145-151.
    No categories
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1176 citations  
  27. Counterfactual Contamination.Simon Goldstein & John Hawthorne - 2022 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 100 (2):262-278.
    Many defend the thesis that when someone knows p, they couldn’t easily have been wrong about p. But the notion of easy possibility in play is relatively undertheorized. One structural idea in the literature, the principle of Counterfactual Closure (CC), connects easy possibility with counterfactuals: if it easily could have happened that p, and if p were the case, then q would be the case, it follows that it easily could have happened that q. We first argue that while (...)
    Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  28.  5
    Counterfactuals: paths of the might have been.Christopher Prendergast - 2019 - London, UK: Bloomsbury Academic.
    What are counterfactuals and what is their point? In many cases, none at all. It may be true that if kangaroos didn't have tails, they would fall over, but they do have tails and if they didn't they wouldn't be kangaroos (or would they?). This is the sort of thing that can give counterfactuals a bad name, as inhabitants of a La La Land of the mind. On the other hand, counterfactuals do useful service across a broad (...)
    Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  29. Counterfactuals.David Lewis - 1973 - Tijdschrift Voor Filosofie 36 (3):602-605.
    No categories
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1204 citations  
  30. Counterfactuals.David Lewis - 1973 - Philosophy of Science 42 (3):341-344.
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1062 citations  
  31.  13
    Backtracking Counterfactuals.Julius von Kügelgen, Abdirisak Mohamed & Sander Beckers - forthcoming - Proceedings of the 2Nd Conference on Causal Learning and Reasoning.
    Counterfactual reasoning -- envisioning hypothetical scenarios, or possible worlds, where some circumstances are different from what (f)actually occurred (counter-to-fact) -- is ubiquitous in human cognition. Conventionally, counterfactually-altered circumstances have been treated as "small miracles" that locally violate the laws of nature while sharing the same initial conditions. In Pearl's structural causal model (SCM) framework this is made mathematically rigorous via interventions that modify the causal laws while the values of exogenous variables are shared. In recent years, however, this purely interventionist (...)
    Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  32. A counterfactual account of essence.Berit Brogaard & Joe Salerno - 2007 - The Reasoner.
    Kit Fine (1994. “Essence and Modality”, Philosophical Perspectives 8: 1-16) argues that the standard modal account of essence as de re modality is ‘fundamentally misguided’ (p. 3). We agree with his critique and suggest an alternative counterfactual analysis of essence. As a corollary, our counterfactual account lends support to non-vacuism the thesis that counterpossibles (i.e., counterfactual conditionals with impossible antecedents) are not always vacuously true.
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   17 citations  
  33. Counterfactuals and Explanatory Pluralism.Kareem Khalifa, Gabriel Doble & Jared Millson - 2018 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 71 (4):1439-1460.
    Recent literature on non-causal explanation raises the question as to whether explanatory monism, the thesis that all explanations submit to the same analysis, is true. The leading monist proposal holds that all explanations support change-relating counterfactuals. We provide several objections to this monist position. 1Introduction2Change-Relating Monism's Three Problems3Dependency and Monism: Unhappy Together4Another Challenge: Counterfactual Incidentalism4.1High-grade necessity4.2Unity in diversity5Conclusion.
    Direct download (5 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   13 citations  
  34.  87
    Understanding Counterfactuals, Understanding Causation: Issues in Philosophy and Psychology.Christoph Hoerl, Teresa McCormack & Sarah R. Beck (eds.) - 2011 - Oxford:: Oxford University Press.
    How are causal judgements such as 'The ice on the road caused the traffic accident' connected with counterfactual judgements such as 'If there had not been any ice on the road, the traffic accident would not have happened'? This volume throws new light on this question by uniting, for the first time, psychological and philosophical approaches to causation and counterfactuals. Traditionally, philosophers have primarily been interested in connections between causal and counterfactual claims on the level of meaning or truth-conditions. (...)
    Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   6 citations  
  35. Counterfactuals, hyperintensionality and Hurford disjunctions.Hüseyin Güngör - 2023 - Linguistics and Philosophy 46 (1):169-195.
    This paper investigates propositional hyperintensionality in counterfactuals. It starts with a scenario describing two children playing on a seesaw and studies the truth-value predictions for counterfactuals by four different semantic theories. The theories in question are Kit Fine’s truthmaker semantics, Luis Alonso-Ovalle’s alternative semantics, inquisitive semantics and Paolo Santorio’s syntactic truthmaker semantics. These predictions suggest that the theories that distinguish more of a given set of intensionally equivalent sentences (Fine and Alonso-Ovalle’s) fare better than those that do not (...)
    Direct download (5 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  36. Levelling counterfactual scepticism.Katie Steele & Alexander Sandgren - 2020 - Synthese 199 (1-2):927-947.
    In this paper, we develop a novel response to counterfactual scepticism, the thesis that most ordinary counterfactual claims are false. In the process we aim to shed light on the relationship between debates in the philosophy of science and debates concerning the semantics and pragmatics of counterfactuals. We argue that science is concerned with many domains of inquiry, each with its own characteristic entities and regularities; moreover, statements of scientific law often include an implicit ceteris paribus clause that restricts (...)
    Direct download (4 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   9 citations  
  37. Overdetermination, Counterfactuals, and Mental Causation.Chiwook Won - 2014 - Philosophical Review 123 (2):205-229.
    The overdetermination problem has long been raised as a challenge to nonreductive physicalism. Nonreductive physicalists have, in various ways, tried to resolve the problem through appeal to counterfactuals. This essay does two things. First, it takes up the question whether counterfactuals can yield an appropriate notion of causal redundancy and argues for a negative answer. Second, it examines how this issue bears on the mental causation debate. In particular, it considers the argument that the overdetermination problem simply does (...)
    Direct download (4 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   13 citations  
  38. Counterfactuals and Two Kinds of Expected Utility.Allan Gibbard & William L. Harper - 1978 - In A. Hooker, J. J. Leach & E. F. McClennen (eds.), Foundations and Applications of Decision Theory. D. Reidel. pp. 125-162.
  39. Counterfactuals and causal explanation.James Woodward - 2002 - International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 18 (1):41 – 72.
    This article defends the use of interventionist counterfactuals to elucidate causal and explanatory claims against criticisms advanced by James Bogen and Peter Machamer. Against Bogen, I argue that counterfactual claims concerning what would happen under interventions are meaningful and have determinate truth values, even in a deterministic world. I also argue, against both Machamer and Bogen, that we need to appeal to counterfactuals to capture the notions like causal relevance and causal mechanism. Contrary to what both authors suppose, (...)
    Direct download (8 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   27 citations  
  40. Counterfactual Decision Theory.Brian Hedden - 2023 - Mind 132 (527):730-761.
    I defend counterfactual decision theory, which says that you should evaluate an action in terms of which outcomes would likely obtain were you to perform it. Counterfactual decision theory has traditionally been subsumed under causal decision theory as a particular formulation of the latter. This is a mistake. Counterfactual decision theory is importantly different from, and superior to, causal decision theory, properly so called. Causation and counterfactuals come apart in three kinds of cases. In cases of overdetermination, an action (...)
    Direct download (4 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  41. Counterfactual Skepticism and Multidimensional Semantics.H. Orri Stefánsson - 2018 - Erkenntnis 83 (5):875-898.
    It has recently been argued that indeterminacy and indeterminism make most ordinary counterfactuals false. I argue that a plausible way to avoid such counterfactual skepticism is to postulate the existence of primitive modal facts that serve as truth-makers for counterfactual claims. Moreover, I defend a new theory of ‘might’ counterfactuals, and develop assertability and knowledge criteria to suit such unobservable ‘counterfacts’.
    Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   13 citations  
  42. Counterfactuals of Ontological Dependence.Sam Baron - 2022 - Journal of the American Philosophical Association 8 (2):278-299.
    A great deal has been written about 'would' counterfactuals of causal dependence. Comparatively little has been said regarding 'would' counterfactuals of ontological dependence. The standard Lewis-Stalnaker semantics is inadequate for handling such counterfactuals. That's because some of these counterfactuals are counterpossibles, and the standard Lewis-Stalnaker semantics trivializes for counterpossibles. Fortunately, there is a straightforward extension of the Lewis-Stalnaker semantics available that handles counterpossibles: simply take Lewis's closeness relation that orders possible worlds and unleash it across impossible (...)
    Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  43. Counterfactual donkeys don't get high.Michael Deigan - 2018 - Proceedings of Sinn Und Bedeutung 22 1:367--384.
    I present data that suggest the universal entailments of counterfactual donkey sentences aren’t as universal as some have claimed. I argue that this favors the strategy of attributing these entailments to a special property of the similarity ordering on worlds provided by some contexts, rather than to a semantically encoded sensitivity to assignment.
    Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  44.  48
    Downward Counterfactuals and Motivation: The Wake-Up Call and the Pangloss Effect.Keith Markman & Matthew McMullen - 2000 - Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 26 (5):575-584.
    Three studies examined the motivational implications of thinking about how things could have been worse. It was hypothesized that when these downward counterfactuals yield negative affect, through consideration of the possibility of a negative outcome, motivation to change and improve would be increased (the wake-up call). When downward counterfactuals yield positive affect, through diminishing the impact of a potentially negative outcome, motivation to change and improve should be reduced (the Pangloss effect). Results from three studies supported these hypotheses. (...)
    Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  45. Counterfactual Discourse in Context.Karen S. Lewis - 2018 - Noûs 52 (3):481-507.
    The classic Lewis-Stalnaker semantics for counterfactuals captures that Sobel sequences are consistent sequences, for example: a.If Sophie had gone to the parade, she would have seen Pedro dance. b.But if Sophie had gone to the parade and been stuck behind someone tall, she would not have seen Pedro dance. But reverse a sequence like this one and it no longer sounds so good, which is surprising on the classic semantics. This observation motivated Kai von Fintel and Thony Gillies to (...)
    Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   16 citations  
  46.  44
    Counterfactual Thinking, Persistence, and Performance: A Test of the Reflection and Evaluation Model.Keith Markman, Matthew McMullen & Ronald Elizaga - 2008 - Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 44 (2):421-428.
    The present research extends previous functional accounts of counterfactual thinking by incorporating the notion of reflective and evaluative processing. Participants generated counterfactuals about their anagram performance, after which their persistence and performance on a second set of anagrams was measured. Evaluative processing of upward counterfactuals elicited a larger increase in persistence and better performance than did reflective processing of upward counterfactuals, whereas reflective processing of downward counterfactuals elicited a larger increase in persistence and better performance than (...)
    Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  47.  24
    I-Counterfactuals.Dorothy Edgington - 2008 - Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 108 (1pt1):1-21.
    I argue that the suppositional view of conditionals, which is quite popular for indicative conditionals, extends also to subjunctive or counterfactual conditionals. According to this view, conditional judgements should not be construed as factual, categorical judgements, but as judgements about the consequent under the supposition of the antecedent. The strongest evidence for the view comes from focusing on the fact that conditional judgements are often uncertain; and conditional uncertainty, which is a well-understood notion, does not function like uncertainty about matters (...)
    No categories
    Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   50 citations  
  48.  11
    Counterfactuals and Scientific Realism.Michael J. Shaffer - 2012 - London and Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan.
    This book is a sustained defense of the compatibility of the presence of idealizations in the sciences and scientific realism. So, the book is essentially a detailed response to the infamous arguments raised by Nancy Cartwright to the effect that idealization and scientific realism are incompatible.
    Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   9 citations  
  49. Counterfactual Dependence and Time’s Arrow’, Reprinted with Postscripts In.David K. Lewis - 1986 - Philosophical Papers 2.
    No categories
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   263 citations  
  50. Counterfactual Dependence and Time’s Arrow.David Lewis - 1979 - Noûs 13 (4):455-476.
1 — 50 / 1000