Alan Hájek Talk
Tuesday, November 12,
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Speaker(s): Alan Hájek
Join the Philosophy Department in welcoming Alan Hájek for an upcoming talk! We look forward to an engaging discussion that promises to challenge and inspire. Please see the abstract below for more details on the topic:
A Chancy Theory of Counterfactuals
Alan Hájek
ABSTRACT
I have long argued against the Stalnaker/Lewis ‘similarity’ accounts of counterfactuals. Roughly, they say that the counterfactual
if p were the case, q would be the case
is true if and only if
at the most similar p-worlds, q is true.
Most philosophers agree with this. I disagree. I will summarise my main arguments against this entire approach and add some new ones.
I will offer a paradigm shift based on conditional chances. The counterfactual is true iff the chance of q, given p, equals 1 at a time shortly, but not too shortly, before the truth value of p was settled. I will argue that this account has many advantages over the similarity accounts.
What are the chances? I will present my version of a propensity account, and I will argue that it avoids the main objections that have been levelled against propensities. In short, I offer a conditional propensity account of counterfactuals.
