Anthony Gillies: “Counterfactual Scorekeeping”. ms.
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.
Let me say two things:
[1] I have read the first pages of the paper. Firstly Gilles’ ideas still have to be checked against an explicit modal system. Though I notice he based his analyses on the properties of natural language semantics, it would be interesting if we pick a set of axioms, say S4 or S5 or any other, for instance, and see what the syntax and the semantics of the system will tell us about his strict conditional analyses, what axioms will apply and so on.
[2]Your paper on the same topic has enticed my curiosity to the extent that I for the moment intend to investigate and work on the issue. By the way, I have added an entire section devoted to it in my blog. Before I had made an insufficient counterfactuals weak.
December 8th, 2005, at 2:01 pm #