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Elusive Counterfactuals†
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Very special thanks to Alan Hájek for extensive comments and conversations about this paper. Thanks are also due to Chris Barker, Sara Bernstein, Alexis Burgess, John Collins, Janice Dowell, Maya Eddon, Nina Emery, Gabriel Greenberg, Shieva Kleinschmidt, Daniel Nolan, Jason Stanley, Catherine Sutton, and Katja Vogt. Earlier drafts of this paper benefited enormously from the comments and questions of audience members at the 2014 Pacific APA symposium on counterfactuals, the University of Chicago Linguistics and Philosophy workshop, the 2014 Philosophy Mountain Workshop, the Australian National University probability reading group, the 2013 NYSWIP Lectures in Honor of Ruth Barcan Marcus, a 2012 colloqium at California State University-Northridge, the UCLA Language Workshop, and the Coalition of Los Angeles Philosophers. All mistakes are my own.
Abstract
I offer a novel solution to the problem of counterfactual skepticism: the worry that all contingent counterfactuals without explicit probabilities in the consequent are false. I argue that a specific kind of contextualist semantics and pragmatics for would- and might-counterfactuals can block both central routes to counterfactual skepticism. One, it can explain the clash between would- and might-counterfactuals as in: (1) If you had dropped that vase, it would have broken. and (2) If you had dropped that vase, it might have safely quantum tunneled to China. Two, it can explain why counterfactuals like (1) can be true despite the fact that quantum tunneling worlds are among the most similar worlds. I further argue that this brand of contextualism accounts for the data better than other existing solutions to the problem.