The Problem with Counterfactuals
I haven't read much about counterfactuals but the basic idea seems to me problematic because counterfactuals refer to non existent events.
The counterfactual scenario is completely inaccessible. For example if I say "If the Germans had won WW2" How is it possible to say anything true about this scenario? There is no truth of the matter because X didn't happen.
I don't know what a possible world is because I don't think possibility is a strong notion. We discover what is possible after the fact. For example if it was not possible for water to form ice we would know that because water would never form ice. It is reality that dictates what is possible and not theory.
Overall I find counterfactuals can be commonly used to make negative points that are not logically sound. (In all areas of discourse) They are kind of used as a justification for prejudice. Such as implying you're a praiseworthy parent because you kept your children clothed and fed. That is the equivalent of saying you should be grateful to me for not shooting you. Every scenario would be trivially different if different events happened.
The counterfactual scenario is completely inaccessible. For example if I say "If the Germans had won WW2" How is it possible to say anything true about this scenario? There is no truth of the matter because X didn't happen.
I don't know what a possible world is because I don't think possibility is a strong notion. We discover what is possible after the fact. For example if it was not possible for water to form ice we would know that because water would never form ice. It is reality that dictates what is possible and not theory.
Overall I find counterfactuals can be commonly used to make negative points that are not logically sound. (In all areas of discourse) They are kind of used as a justification for prejudice. Such as implying you're a praiseworthy parent because you kept your children clothed and fed. That is the equivalent of saying you should be grateful to me for not shooting you. Every scenario would be trivially different if different events happened.
Comments (116)
I've myself wondered if a robust theory of truth such as the correspondence theory can adequately incorporate counterfactual statements into their stable (not to mention certain types of future-tensed statements).
If I say, "if I were to strike this porcelain dish with a hammer, then it would shatter," or "if I had struck this porcelain dish with a hammer, then it would have shattered," both of these utterances seem to be truth-apt (that is, possessing a truth value), yet what do they "correspond" to? There is no event or state of affairs to which these utterances map onto (or to which they fail to do so), and yet they seem quite clearly true, given our knowledge of hammers and the mechanical properties of thin sheets of porcelain. Likewise, they would just as clearly seem to be false had I substituted "titanium" for "porcelain."
Perhaps something like the coherence theory of truth is better-equipped to handle them.
Maybe one the main problems afflicting the correspondence theory of truth is the way in which it seems to presuppose a form of uncritical metaphysical realism. If the "holding" of a state of affairs, and the truth of the proposition somehow expressing this state of affairs, merely give rise to some sort of a "correspondence" of the former with the latter, then the issue of the conceptual structure of "reality" that makes this correspondance possible is rendered problematic. On the other hand, some apparently innocuous statements of the so called correspondence theory could be construed on the lines of a deflationary (or 'identity') theory of truth. This is how some philosophers (e.g. Jennifer Hornsby or Sebasian Rödl) construe Aristotle's claim that “to say of what is that it is not, or of what is not that it is, is false, while to say of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not, is true” (1011b25). Thus construed, the theory doesn't entail nor presuppose any sort of problematic dualism of (conceptualized) propositions and (unconceptualized) states of affairs.
Back to the original question, then, if we admit of conceptually structured states of affairs, what "corresponds" to the truth of counterfactual conditional statements could be their being logical consequences of the things having real albeit unactualized powers. If our metaphysics admits of objects that have among their real properties not only "occurrent" qualities (either "primary" or "secondary") such as geometrical shapes or color, but also real albeit unactualized powers, then the proposition that "if I were to strike this porcelain dish with a hammer, then it would shatter" could be said to be true if the ascription of a real power, of which it is a logical consequence, "corresponds" to a truth about this power (in the deflationary sense of "corresponds"). That is, to say that it is true that a dish is liable to shatter when struck -- ascribing some sort of a "passive power" to the dish -- just is to say that it is liable to shatter when struck. And if that is the case, then any proposition that logically follows from this also is true, and this includes a definite range of counterfactual conditional statements. It is then the truth of this whole range of counterfactual statements that "corresponds" (in the deflationary sense) to something's having real unactualized powers.
From a pragmatic realist (i.e., pragmaticist) standpoint, subjunctive conditionals are true when the laws of nature that they express are real generals; i.e., they are operative regardless of what anyone thinks about them. Peirce famously demonstrated this during a lecture by holding up a stone and stating that everyone in the audience knew that if he were to let it go, it would fall to the ground; and this was true even if he never actually let go of the stone. Similarly, a quality is a real possibility; e.g., if one were to shine broad-spectrum light on a red object, it would predominantly reflect it at wavelengths between 620 and 750 nm. Again, this is true even if no one ever actually conducts such an experiment.
The probability can be known in advance. Changing from determinism to probability doesn't change the fact that there is an apparent order to events, because what makes the probabilities come out the way they do?
The deflationary truth theorists make claims that sound very much like the things correspondence theorists say, but they chip away some of the metaphysically tendentious interpretations of those claims. For instance, a deflationary theorist might happily acknowledge that "snow is white" is true (or can be used to express a true proposition, in English) if and only if snow is white. But she doesn't claim this to imply that there must exist two metaphysically distinct sorts of things -- abstract propositions on the one side, and concrete elements of reality (i.e. states of affair) on the other side -- that somehow problematically correspond to one another. So, I wasn't defending correspondence theories, but merely suggesting that a correspondance theorist might make use of a strategy similar to the one a deflationary theorist might make use of to explain in a realist fashion the meaning of counterfactual conditional statements.
She doesn't, but that doesn't change the fact that you have a sentence in a human language on one side and the state of affairs which makes the sentence true on the other. And so the question is still how the snow being white makes the sentence true, because a sentence isn't a state of affairs, no matter what theory of truth one espouses.
So deflationary theorists still have to account for how we know that the snow is white.
This is very similar the the suggestion that I made though it appeals to a conception of laws that rests on a metaphysics of events and Humean causation while my one suggestion was made on the background of a metaphysics of substances and powers (and substance/agent causation).
I don't think you meant to say "makes the sentence white", but rather "makes the sentence true".
Indeed, the deflationary theorists also have to discharge this burden. But I think they do, by means of broadly Kantian accounts of (intuition dependent) conceptual abilities and theories of judgment. (See for instance McDowell's Mind and World, or Sebastian Rödl's Categories of the Temporal.)
I fixed it after re-reading. But kind of interesting typo. The white from the snow gets into the sentence to make it true, or something! Just kidding, or not, given some of the epic discussions on truth and perception from the old forum.
Quoting Pierre-Normand
I see. So a deflationary view of truth is based on Kantian categories of thought, or can be.
Well, lets say that it is post-critical in the Kantian sense, and not reliant on anything as crude as naive realism. Many deflationary theorists may only make some minimalist formal points about the semantics of "... is true", and hence aren't committed to any sort of metaphysics or epistemology. But what I had in mind were specific developments of deflationary theories (by McDowell, Wiggins, Hornsby and Rödl) that address the epistemological problem that you raised, and that are broadly neo-Kantian in the way they explain conceptual abilities.
So what is the point of deflationary truth? That there is nothing metaphysically significant about truth or propositions? So all one needs to do is give a decent account of knowing, and I suppose some account of how language works, or cognition, and that's all there is to it?
I think the main point of the deflationary theories of truth is negative. It is to show that meaningful uses of the "...is true" predicate in natural language don't have the metaphysical implications that the correspondence theorists (who also often are naive, or "dogmatic", realists) take them to have.
Of course, when this negative point has been made, then the correspondence theorist is entitled to ask the deflationary theorist what alternative metaphysics/epistemology she might be proposing instead.
(This is somewhat side-tracking us from the problem of counterfactuals raised in the OP, though.)
Alright, so to get back on track, what makes a counterfactual true for a deflationary theorist? If Pierce had dropped the stone during a lecture, it would have fallen. That's a true statement, correct?
Yes. The deflationary theorist then would seem to be faced with the same problem that the correspondence theorist was faced with, as andrew4handel explained in the OP. For the deflationary theorist might, at first blush, attempt to explain it thus:
"If Pierce had dropped the stone during a lecture, it would have fallen." is true iff if Pierce had dropped the stone during a lecture, it would have fallen.
Though I am not a logician, it's not even entirely clear to me if there is an unambiguous meaning to the "if and only if, if" complex logical connective that shows up here (even after scope disambiguation). In any case, the strategy that I had suggested might work to simplify the modal semantics a bit (as well as the metaphysics of counterfactual conditionals) is to construe the sentence's meaning as being parasitic on the meaning of a categorical statement about the real power of something. What makes "If Pierce had dropped the stone during a lecture, it would have fallen." true is that "Pierce has the power to see to it that the stone drops during a lecture." is true, since the first sentence can be derived from the second as a material inference from the second one. (i.e., a "material inference", in Wilfrid Sellars's sense, warranted by the conceptual content of the term "power"). And finally, what makes the second sentence about Pierce's power true is that Pierce indeed has this power, as can be ascertained empirically through testing this power of his in some specific circumstances.
Consider the statement "the particle will be at position p at time t". Presumably this statement is either true or false. According to aletheist (as I understand him), we can make sense of statements about the future being true (or false) by referring to the laws of nature which necessitate a particular outcome given the initial conditions. But (assuming that the randomness of quantum mechanics is an ontological fact and not just an epistemic limitation), the laws of nature do not necessitate a particular outcome given the initial conditions (at the quantum scale).
So either the statement "the particle will be at position p at time t" isn't either true or false or something other than a reference to the laws of nature is required to explain its truth value.
Do laws of nature preclude probabilistic outcomes? The coin flip is 50/50. I can predict that in advance. But what makes it 50/50?
It goes to the question of what's behind probability in the world. Saying it's uncaused doesn't explain anything. Why 50/50 and not some other probability?
But the statement we're considering is "the coin will land hands", not "the coin has a 0.5 chance of landing heads". If the former is true, what makes it true? Certainly not the laws of nature, as the laws of nature aren't deterministic (assuming for the sake of argument that the "coin flip" is some quantum event).
Perhaps it would be better to frame the experiment explicitly in terms of a particle whose spin is prepared in superposition?
According to the laws of nature, if you perform a measurement on the particle, you will deterministically obtain "heads" in one branch of a decohered wavefunction, and "tails" in the other. If you take the experiment a stage further, and declare ahead of time that you will visit the north pole on "heads" and the south pole on "tails" then after the experiment a statement of the form "Had I measured 'heads' I would have gone to the north pole" is true.
Strangely, the refusal to collapse the wavefunction, solves not only a number of "paradoxes" in QM but also solves fundamental problems in other fields - e.g we now understand the ontological status of counterfactuals, and can now in certain cases calculate their truth value.
No, what makes the first statement true is not some "power" that Peirce has. Rather, it is the fact that there is a real tendency in the universe for things with mass (such as a stone and the earth) to move toward each other in the absence of some intervening object (such as a man's body).
Quoting Michael
This thread is about counterfactuals, which I prefer to call subjunctive conditionals; your example does not qualify, so the statement is either true or false only if the future is already actual. A relevant statement would be, "If such-and-such were to happen, then the particle would be at position p at time t."
Quoting Michael
Again, no; the statement that we are considering is, "If such-and-such were to happen, then the coin would land heads." Alternatively, as a probabilistic example, "If this is a perfectly fair coin, and I were to flip it infinitely many times, then it would land heads for 50% of the tosses."
What about: "If Pierce had the power to see to it that the stone drops during a lecture, then, if Pierce had dropped the stone during a lecture, it would have fallen."
It seems just as true as the first sentence, but not to be ultimately grounded in some existent having any latent power.
There are many ways to translate statements about occurrences governed by real laws (either deterministic or probabilistic) conceived to be governing sequences of event into statements about occurrences conceived as manifesting the actualization of powers in specific circumstances. Pierce would not have the specific power that I ascribed to him if the masses involved didn't have the power to draw themselves closer to one another. My proposal isn't changed much if you would rspeak of real tendencies rather than of real powers, although I think powers of substances can't always be analysed dispositionally without some loss of meaning. But this caveat isn't really relevant to the issue raised by the OP.
Right, then a counterfactual quantum event rather than a future quantum event. How do you account for its truth, given that the laws of nature do not necessitate a particular outcome? Or would you say that such statements don't have a truth-value?
Or if you believe in metaphysical libertarianism, a counterfactual like "if I hadn't told you this then you wouldn't have chosen to do that"?
I can't be in two different branches of a decohered wavefunction. I'm only ever in one.
It seems to me that some authors use the phrase "counterfactual conditional" to mean the same as "subjunctive conditional", but it also occurs frequently that the former phrase is restricted to those subjunctive conditionals that have a false antecedent. In recent years, I've also noticed that the adjective "counterfactual" has been used in the wider cultures (e.g. in op-eds.) to mean roughly the same as "false", which I find annoying.
Maybe you think you are in charge, or that physics doesn't apply to you because you are special?
For the rest of us, Unitary Quantum Mechanics solves the problem of the ontological status of counterfactuals.
Indeed. If there ends up there being two "copies" of you, you never find yourself in a situation where you are both of them.
It's called decoherence.
It's an empirical fact that I have never flipped a coin and measured it to be both heads and tails.
What would be an example of a "counterfactual quantum event"?
Quoting Michael
Peirce was ahead of his time in recognizing the reality of absolute chance; he held that the laws of nature are not completely exceptionless, such that the slight deviations in our measurements of phenomena are not solely due to error. In other words, all laws of nature are in that sense statistical, even the ones that we treat as deterministic.
I wonder how Unitary Quantum Mechanics deals with the semantics of counterfactual conditional statements that have counterlegal antecedents. (e.g. If Ceasar had led the First Golf War, he would have used catapults. Or, if photons had had a finite rest mass, then they wouldn't be traveling at c)
This notion of the truth seems to revolve around the meaning of words as opposed to states of affairs.
A fact it has been said is a fact regardless of argument or anything we say. So for example imagine you were in the matrix and made the claim if I strike this (..) It will shatter"
Now in reality nothing shatters in the matrix because it is an illusion.
So I don't see how words can ever capture the truth or rather facts unless you can say "This is definitely a fact beyond refute". But there is always room for skepticism and new theories.
If someone claims "if you touch the fire you will burn your hand" they are probably probably basing that on induction. I don't think they are committed to stating law but they are assuming a regularity but not committed to an absolute truth.
The problem I have, is with counterfactuals, that are not usually about things that may be physical "laws" but about whole series of events which have numerous factors involved and where the number of possibilities explodes. In these scenarios the likelihood of a claim having any truth value is vanishing it seems.
But still reality will be the final arbiter and language is unlikely predict the limitations of reality fully.
But if you were to flip a coin such that it landed on its side, then it would be neither heads nor tails. :D
Some counterfactual claim about Schrodinger's cat, for example. "If I had opened the box at 3:00pm then I would have found the cat to be dead".
Then how do you make sense of counterfactuals being true? If the laws of nature are not such that if we had done this then that must have happened (i.e. chance is involved), then your initial explanation doesn't work.
OK, but I think the OP meant discuss a semantical problem that is raised specifically by subjunctive conditionals that have a false antecedent -- that is, by counterfactual conditionals in the strict sense.
I know what it's called. Giving it a name doesn't address the issue.
To explain this further, the OP raises a problem with the correspondence theory of truth. Statements are said to be true if they correspond to some obtaining state of affairs, but statements like "if A had happened then B would have happened" are said to be true even though neither A nor B are obtaining states of affairs.
I guess something more like, "If the bottle of poison were to be broken, then the cat would be dead." Not sure this gets at your point, though.
Quoting Michael
It has to do with the idea that the habits of matter are so inveterate that any deviations from them are extremely minute. So a macro-level subjunctive conditional (e.g., that the stone would fall if released) is true, but a micro-level prediction (e.g., the magnitude of its acceleration) can still exhibit a chance discrepancy that is indistinguishable from measurement error.
Indeed. This is also how I understood the problem.
No, that's not the same. The statement was "If I had opened the box at 3:00pm then I would have found the cat to be dead". The issue is that the laws of nature do not necessitate that the bottle of poison would have been broken at 3:00pm – and nor do they necessitate that the bottle wouldn't have been broken.
So how do you make sense of that statement's truth-value?
This is a bit tricky because the truth of this sentence seems to entail the position Micheal Ayers labeled actualism (in his brilliant The Refutation of Determinism: An Essay in Philosophical Logic, London: Methuen (1968)). That is the position seemingly endorsed (at least tacitly) by many Humeans that whatever is possible is actual, and whatever isn't actual is impossible. This is also the view that there are no unactualized powers. That's because the subjunctive conditional statement that you propose would entail that the failure for Pierce to exercise his power would count as (conclusive) evidence that he lacks the power.
The various theories of truth--correspondence, coherence, consensus, instrumental--only arise within the context of nominalism regarding generals. Pragmatic realism (i.e., pragmaticism) understands truth as encompassing all of these notions, because it is defined as what an infinite community of investigators would believe after an indefinite inquiry.
Perhaps under quantum theory, it does not have one. The proper subjunctive conditional for my approach would presumably be a probabilistic one, like my example of the coin flips.
This seems like an alternative version of modal collapse, which today is widely (though not universally) considered to be a fallacy in modal logic. Usually it is presented as the claim that whatever is actual is necessary, hence it entails strict determinism.
The role of counterfactuals is provide the empirical definiteness - the possible acts of measurement - by which we can take a statement or concept to be true.
So in Peircean terms, the world may not be completely constrained in the way we like to imagine, and yet still we can impose our conceptual map on reality and read off measurements (of the presence or absence of x) as a sign of the truth of something we might say.
So in folk physics, the audience watching Peirce with his stone will have a simple counterfactually framed expectation - that stone will fall when he lets go because it is heavy. And then when it does drop, that is the observable fact which is a sign that their belief structure was true. There was no counterfactual surprise to explain.
To then talk about a theory of gravitating masses is a more sophisticated mental framework. Part of what would be the sign of the theory's truth would be to be able to measure the earth being pulled towards the stone - and were that not the observed case, the theory is in trouble.
Likewise quantum mechanic predicts certain counterfactually-based outcomes - some chance of unpredictable fluctuations. And even thermodynamics predicts the unpredictability of all the atoms in the stone happening to thermally fluctuate upwards at the instant of release. That has to be a possibility - perhaps infinitely remote - if the deterministic statements of thermodynamics are true.
So the Peircean view of truth is triadic. Concepts are truth-apt to the degree they support a counterfactual-based notion of the signs or measurements that would make them so. This puts the act of measurement back in the mind of the observer of course. But it makes what is going on explicit. Truth is based on the signs that seem close enough to what we would expect to experience if x was the case, vs not-x being the case.
So the OPs problem was with counterfactuals being granted too much apparent reality. But it is instead the notion of the factual which is granted too much realness by naive or direct realists. Truth is always a judgement that we have been given the proper sign that some thought is right. And we can only aspire to that kind of certainty if we could also know for sure what it would have looked like instead for that belief to have been matchingly false.
This really bites when our ideas are in fact framed vaguely and so we can't possibly imagine what would count as evidence either way.
Hmmm... I would hope that that an ideal community of investigators would end up not merely producing a final theory that encompasses all the early theoretical attempts, but that it would also discard some false starts ;-)
So verificationism?
But modern physics - the path integral or sum over histories view - is more sophisticated in realising that many possiblities are contradictory in their actuality. If a particle could take the left slit, it could equally take the right, hence self interference as a statistically real fact.
So the quantum ontological view we have been forced to is that every possiblility is "virtually" actual, and yet much of that actuality is a self contradiction that suppresses actual actualisation. Instead what exists is the counterfactuality of all those possiblities not having happened ... and yet existing in a wavefunction fashion to have definitely constrained the space of the possible.
At the quantum level, counterfactuality is very real. It is the actual constraint on possibility by possibility itself.
Of course many find this weirdness too difficult to accept - hence the retreat back into deterministic interpretations like many worlds and their actual multiverses.
Interesting! Indeed, it seems to be equivalent.
1) Actual(P) entails Nec(P) (=def modal collapse)
2) Actual(~P) entails Nec(~P)
3) ~Nec(~P) entails ~Actual(~P)
4) Possible(P) entails P (=def actualism)
Interestingly enough, the route that leads to actualism (or to modal collapse) begins with a healthy dose of Humean skepticism about "natural necessity", or the necessities derived from a realist interpretation of nomological event causation. This leads the Humean skeptic to be equally skeptical about unactualized powers. The last step for the Humean skeptic is to retain the concept of a power but to narrow its scope of application strictly to actualized powers. What is ironical is that this conclusion then condones a strict metaphysical determinism: the strongest possible form of causal neccessitation!
Yep. In the end, the default position has to be some bare instrumentalism.
But Peircean epistemology wants to offer more that that. It recognises also the fact that we are modelling the world with evolutionary purpose. There is an internal criterion in operation because - contra the simple positivist - we have interests at stake.
So that is deflationary of our truth-making. On the other hand, accepting we are motivated by purposes in modelling means we could decide to "tell the truth of reality" as our goal - leading to the usual search for maximum invariance in statements. And also it means that we can trust to a community of like minds - expect that a common purpose will drive the evolution of ideation towards some best outcome in the long run.
Verificationism is the bare bones position. Pragmatism fleshes out that view of truth so that it gives us choices about where we might want to sit on some scale of subjectivity~objectivity. It is a model of the modelling relation. So more interesting than mere instrumentalism.
Again, that is the wrong kind of subjunctive conditional. You verify "if X were to happen then Y would happen" by making X happen (e.g., conducting an experiment) and observing that Y does, in fact, happen. And you keep on doing this indefinitely, since the scope of the subjunctive conditional is not limited to any collection of actual events; it is a real general that governs an inexhaustible continuum of possible events. You never really verify it, at least not in the strict sense; rather, you corroborate it - i.e., you never falsify it.
So you have to take the probabilistic big picture view - as in, Popperian falsification. Pragmatism only claims to minimise our uncertainty about some proposition. In that sense, absolute verification is a naive realist's pipedream.
[altheist beat me to it. :) ]
hmm, I wasn't trying to suggest an actualist view. I think my intent may have been unclear because the example we were playing with (pierce, rock, gravity) doesn't lend itself gracefully as an example.
Say we're talking about someone else, alex, who has the power to benchpress 400 pounds. We could say: if alex lacked the power to benchpress 400 pounds, then if he attempted to benchpress 400 pounds, the bar would raise 3 inches (whereas a full benchpress would raise it mich higher)
This seems (1) to be true & (2) true in a way that cannot ultimately be explained by the fact that an existing being possesses (either latent or actualized) powers.
It seems like the difference between this sort of counterfactual and the orginal pierce example is that in this case, it is not a matter of counterfactual events, but of counterfactual possesions of powers (What if alex didn't have that power? what if eric did? etc. )
It may be that I'm just not familiar enough with the subject and counterfactuals are always of the possible future event (sea battle, say) type?
Counterfactuals are interesting and difficult, but not mysterious. They can be given reasonable treatments that don't commit to bizarre metaphysics.
The classical view is that you can order possible world-states along some contextually determined relation of metaphysical similarity, and that any counterfactual with the antecedent 'If the Germans won world war 2...' would be true just in case the consequent is true relative to all of the worlds closest to the actual world in which 'the Germans won WW2' is true. The difficulty is then the determination of the similarity relation.
Counterfactuals aren't a problem for any theory of truth so far as I can tell. Modal truths are in a sense 'about' non-actual world states, but they are evaluated nonetheless relative to the actual world, and possible world-states 'accessible' from it, in the sense of modal logic. So it can be an 'actual fact,' for example, that something can or could happen, since what can or could happen is determined by the actual abilities of individuals, or metaphysical possibilities that are actually in place.
I'm not familiar with either the literature on counterfactuals or Lewis, but I've heard the whispers, and isn't Lewis like the ne plus ultra of committing to bizarre metaphysics to explain counterfactuals? Which of course wouldn't meant that a particular essay he wrote on the topic wouldn't be helpful, even if you don't agree with his metaphysical stuff - but then, if he presents things clearly, in that work, one would imagine he'd also have presented things clearly to himself - so then why the weirdness?
Or is just that the whispers are wrong (I don't think I've read a word of Lewis in the original, or a page of secondary literature directly treating his work)
Your example then would be an example of a counterfactual conditional statement used to specify what it is for individuals of a specific kind (e.g. human beings) to have the power to benchpress 400 pounds, or to lack this power. Do we have a problem with the semantics of this statement in the actual case where the antecedent is false (i.e. in the actual case where Alex has the power to benchpress 400 pounds?
Rather than being faced with a counterfactual conditional statement where the antecedent describes an unactualized power, as my initial suggestion was meant to be dealing with, we now have an antecedent that describes a power not being possessed by an individual, in the counterfactual case, that he actually possesses. The statement that you propose then is a logical consequence of a partial definition of what it is for individuals of a specific kind not to possess a specific power. This definition could be construed as a partial specification of what it is for actual human beings no to possess the power to lift 400 pounds. It would go something like this: "Someone who raises the bar no more than 3 inches when she attempts to benchpress 400 pounds lack the power to benchpress 400 pounds." The deflationary explanation of the truth of this partial definitional statement would be: "Someone who raises the bar no more than 3 inches when she attempts to benchpress 400 pounds lacks the power to benchpress 400 pounds." is true if someone who raises the bar no more than 3 inches when she attempts to benchpress 400 pounds lacks the power to benchpress 400 pounds.
In line with my previous suggestion, the counterfactual conditional statement regarding Alex can be regarded to be true on account of the fact that it is a logical consequence of this partial definition of the lack of a power to benchpress 400 pounds.
The book I mentioned is for the most part a semantic/logical exercise. It's a lot more enlightening than abstract ruminations on the nature of possibility and truth are ever going to be. I would even say they make those ruminations look confused in retrospect – it's one of those works that can make people have conversion experiences to analytic philosophy. Worth a read.
I quite agree with you on both counts, regarding the complementary strength/weaknesses of both traditions.
The modal realism is uninteresting precisely because it is informal – it's still not clear to me what motivates it or what it's trying to solve, and it seems to make mince-meat of the ordinary truth conditions of counterfactuals anyway. It seems to me a deeply confused position, but the beauty of it is that it's literally a position that doesn't matter, so it can be ignored, whereas the formal treatment of counterfactuals does.
I remember either Timothy Williamson or Scott Soames (or maybe both) making this exact same methodological recommendation. David Wiggins also sometimes formalises some of his arguments in a very precise fashion. But he also proposes the methodological principle that, in order to pass a necessary sanity test, arguments that are couched in technical or semi-technical terms must make sense when rephrased in plain English (or whatever your native language is).
The formalization of arguments is less interested than the formalization of logics, grammatical fragments, and so on. If you see philosophy as a sort of conceptual engineering, you can have genuine results, improvements, and so on. Arguments are a bit pointless because you can just deny a premise, or just create a new distinction to resolve a contradiction. But you can't deny the efficacy of a model in producing certain results – so as long as it's agreed that such a result is desirable, there's a metric of improvement, and so long as it's not clear what's desirable, there are no serious stakes anyway.
'Continental' methodologies are generally constructed to expand the palate, cause sea-changes in world-view, harmonize historical trends, and so on. That's fine and all, but it gets boring. You want to work with your hands, and you just can't do that with that sort of philosophy. There's nothing to hit resistance against, nothing to build.
I think I've mentioned it before, but that aspect of formalization is something I encountered while dabbling with programming, and it's just extremely satisfying to have that kind of concrete push-back when you're doing the wrong thing (e.g., in this case, the program crashes or gives bunk output.) All that said, though, I think it's ok to keep an eye on a Big Picture so long as you do so warily.
I would differ with this. He had to lift the stone into the appropriate position, and hold it there with the possibility of dropping it. So, what makes the statement true, really is some power that Peirce has. Nature may set up some rocks on the side of a cliff, but it really doesn't have the power to drop the rock whenever it wants. Nature doesn't have the capacity to propose "if I drop the stone".
It's not. The discussion is explicitly about counterfactuals. The exact example in the OP is "For example if I say 'If the Germans had won WW2' How is it possible to say anything true about this scenario?"
You said it was verificationism. Now you're saying it's falsification?
But even if it's falsification, how do you falsify the counterfactual "if X had happened then Y would have happened"?
My point was that counterfactuality amounts to having some theory in play. You can be sure of X because you are sure of what would count as not-x. So counterfactuality becomes the basis on which we can verify or falsify.
You are thinking of counterfactual conditionals- a strictly logicist issue. I'm talking about the place of counterfactuality in pragmatic or scientific reasoning.
Remember that I was replying on your specific question about Schrödinger's cat/Peircean epistemology. So I'm talking about counterfactuality in the context of what QM would call counterfactual definiteness.
My question about Schrödinger's cat was directed at aletheist's claim that counterfactual claims can be said to be true (or false) because the laws of nature necessitate a particular outcome given the antecedent. But there are situations where this doesn't work. So given a counterfactual claim such as "had I opened the box at this particular time I would have found the cat to be dead", something other than a reference to the laws of nature must be used to explain its truth value (assuming it has one).
And I don't really understand how your approach solves this problem.
Let's ignore verification, which is irrelevant and impossible, but the counterfactual nature of falsification is even worse (or better if you like them).
For a falsification to occur, a certain task (the test resulting in a falsifying outcome) must be possible if the theory is false.
Thus testing is doubly counterfactual!
So, whether you like counterfactuals or not, they really seem more important than a mere linguistic curiosity.
Interestingly, the Lewisian or Everettian take on the ontological status of counterfactuals (i.e. that if they obey the laws of physics, they are real) doesn't work for the principle of testing.
For any statement to be true, it must agree with the laws of physics. This goes for factual and counterfactual statements.
QM then is a further complication here as it says that even when the choice of future outcomes is constrained to be bivalent, all you might be able to say by way of prediction is something probabilistic. But even classically, that is the case with a coin toss - ahead of the flip, you know the outcome is going to be heads or tails, but your guess is 50/50.
So the OP raised a concern about valid deduction using counterfactuals. But they have other uses in reasoning. And even modal logic tries to get at that in imagining ensembles of worlds where it is as if some experiment has been run using an infinity of slightly different conditions.
So given the counterfactual statements "if I had opened the box at time t I would have found the cat to be dead" and "if I had opened the box at time t I would have found the cat to be alive", which agrees with the laws of physics?
And what of statements like "bachelors are unmarried men" and "1 plus 1 equals 2"? Surely their truth has nothing to do with the laws of physics.
Also, what do you mean by the laws of physics? Are you referring to our models? Because our models have been wrong before (and some of our current ones are probably also wrong).
So to do physics now, we actually have to be able to sum up possibilities in concrete fashion. Counterfactuals are real not just for general physical laws (altheist's point), they are real for individual quantum events.
So we have to abandon the principle of bivalence (in at least some occasions)? Some statements do not have exactly one truth value? We can't say either that "if I had opened the box at time t I would have found the cat to be dead" is true and "if I had opened the box at time t I would have found the cat to be alive" is false or that "if I had opened the box at time t I would have found the cat to be dead" is false and "if I had opened the box at time t I would have found the cat to be alive" is true.
It depends how precise you insist on being with your language and the particular history you are in.
The laws of physics state that the proportion of the instances of you that become correlated with the dead or alive cat varies with time, so any statement that agrees with that is true.
Really, you just appear to be being argumentative and not even trying.
Please don't abandon reason! You just need to index yourself against the outcome of a quantum measurement. The subjective perspective of a particular index, renders the other outcomes counterfactual, not false.
So a statement like "if I had opened the box at time t I would have found the cat to be dead" could be true even though the laws of nature do not determine that this would have been the outcome?
Then something other than the laws of nature must be used to explain how such a counterfactual claim can be true. aletheist's answer to the problem doesn't work.
The laws of nature state that deterministically, that is only "half" the story. "Half" being used as shorthand for the proportion determined by the laws of physics.
A statement such as:
"if I had opened the box at earlier time t I would have found the cat to be dead"
Can't be given a truth value as it stands.
A statement such as:
"if I had opened the box at earlier time t, a proportion p of the instances of me would have found cat to be dead"
can.
By the way, we not only solve the ontological status of counterfactuals this way, but we solve the problems with the foundations of probability theory.
So for you, if QM's indeterminism is a falsification of your preference for metaphysical determinism, then you reject QM as an adequate account of nature. The world has to adjust itself so that it conforms to your notion of how to be truth-apt.
You started off backwards on this whole issue, and now you are aiming to be as backwards as it could possibly get.
Or you could just stick to Unitary Quantum Mechanics, and you can keep your determinism, solve the problem of counterfactuals, explain probability, discover the cause of the arrow of time...
No, all I'm saying is that aletheist's solution to the problem of counterfactuals doesn't work. He said that "if X then Y" is true if the laws of nature determine that if X happens then Y will happen. But when it comes to quantum events, the laws of nature don't determine that if X happens then Y will happen; they only determine that if X happens then Y might happen – even if "if X then Y" is true.
So something other than the laws of nature make it the case that "if X then Y" is true.
This is ambiguous. Are you say that it doesn't have a truth value, or only that we can't determine what that truth value is? If the former then we've abandoned the principle of bivalence. If the latter then we need to refer to something other than the laws of nature to explain its truth value.
Translating the statement slightly:
"In all the worlds where I opened the box at earlier time t, I discovered the cat to be dead"
Is a false statement.
It's not the power to drop the stone, which is relevant here, it's the power to hold the stone up in a position where it may be dropped, which is relevant. The proposed counterfactual is only produced according to this power to hold the stone above the floor. Set the stone on the table, and the table acts as that "power" which holds the stone above the floor.
This is the difference between the Newtonian way of looking at gravity, and the Einsteinian way. Newton looks at objects as separate from each other, such that their "natural state" is to be separate, and then a force, gravity is required to drive them together. The Einsteinian way reduces gravity to a property of the unity of objects, such that the natural state of objects is to be unified. But from this perspective it is necessary to determine the force which holds objects apart.
How can the laws of nature be "real generals" when something so simple as gravity can be understood in these two opposing ways? One way is that objects are naturally divided, and there is a force which moves objects toward each other, and the other way is that objects are naturally united, and there is a force which holds them apart.
Quoting aletheist
So what is the "real counterfactual" here? Hasn't the man simply produced something unnatural, produced something counter-nature, by picking up the rock and separating it form the earth? Then your so-called "real tendency", is only the result of this artificial separation. Now the law, the so-called "real general", only applies in these instances of artificial separation. This real general doesn't apply to naturally occurring situations at all.
You do realise that you keep trying to build in a classical notion of causality where the past constrains the future in some general fashion? So you are making what since QM - as in delayed choice quantum eraser experiments - has become a questionable presumption. Instead - retrocausally - the future can constrain the past.
So the laws of nature can be real generals, or actual constraints. But they are not as anchored in the general thermodynamic arrow of time or causality as classical metaphysics would presume. The quantum scale of action sits outside of this flow - doing its non-classical sum over all counterfactual possibilities so as to take even its unhappened future into account as part of its wavefunction.
Gravity is pulling on the stone in Peirce's hands. So that sets up a reasonable expectation in our minds. It would fall, but he is stopping that. However the stone has some remote possibility of quantum tunnelling through Peirce's mitts. That too is part of the natural law here. You just would treat it as a remote possibility as you are unlikely to think it reasonable to spend the rest of eternity waiting for that to happen.
So quantum natural law simply defies your preconceptions with regards to counterfactuality both in time and space. Counterfactually, the stone could be on the other side of Peirce's hands. Hence tunnelling really happens.
That's not the statement I used. You're changing it to avoid addressing the problem. The statement is a counterfactual claim about the one world that I would have experienced, where only a single result is measured. I will never measure the coin to be both heads and tails and I will never measure the cat to be both dead and alive. It's one or the other, and it's a claim about what that one measurement would have been.
I'm solving your problem, or rather Modal Realism and Quantum Mechanics are independently solving your problem, and many other problems.
You're not solving the problem. You haven't explained how the statement ""if I had opened the box at earlier time t I would have found the cat to be dead" can have a bivalent truth value.
All you're explaining is how different statements can have a bivalent truth value. But that's a red herring.
Under unitary quantum mechanics, the statement, "if I had opened the box at earlier time t I would have found the cat to be dead" doesn't have a truth value because it doesn't unambiguously pick out a specific branch of the wave function.
In other words, the statement is not properly grounded.
The clue is in the Modal Realism and the Quantum Mechanics.
If the statement agrees with the laws of physics, it is true - there is a world in which it is a fact. You might not be in that world, so for you the truth would be counterfactual.
If we are to accept imprecise statements as having a truth-value in the spirit of brevity and in full knowledge that we each are sufficiently versed in QM, so that we can assume each others meaning, then your statement is true, and has a single truth-value.
The problem with this is that it entails that both "if I had opened the box at earlier time t I would have found the cat to be dead" and "if I had opened the box at earlier time t I would have found the cat to be alive" are true, as the cat being dead and the cat being alive are both possible outcomes of the measurement. So under your account we have to abandon the law of non-contradiction.
So I was right in saying that we have to abandon the principle of bivalence if we are to adopt this understanding of truth. And as the OP suggests, counterfactual claims (of a certain kind at least), can't be true.
No, we have to abandon the idea that the statement meaningfully refers to something. Suppose I was speaking to a crowd of people and I said, "You have a red shirt." That statement lacks a truth value unless I'm addressing a specific person.
The problem is not the principle of bivalence, it's the presence of ambiguity.
So in other words all counterfactuals are trivially true (if physically possible) because we can simply stipulate that they refer to the possible worlds in which the described events happen?
Yes.
Because we construct different models of real generals, for different purposes.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
"Artifical" vs. "natural" has nothing to do with it. If an earthquake were to dislodge a stone from the edge of a cliff, then it would fall to the bottom.
I said that "if X then Y" is true if the laws of nature are such that if X were to happen then Y would happen. I was not trying to offer a solution for any other type of counterfactual.
Does it, though? What if ten people in the crowd had a red shirt? Does the statement fail to refer to them?
I've certainly listened to speakers use a general you to address some people in the crowd.
Maybe the problem is expecting that ordinary language propositions necessarily rely on bivalence. In the case of QM, the truth value can depend on which branch, if one adopts MWI.
The weatherman says it will probably rain today. Truth apt? Of course.
There's actually no problem making (bivalent) truth apt statements for quantum scenarios. The problem is only that statements that are truth apt in a classic scenario may not be truth apt in a quantum scenario because there is no one-to-one translation. The conceptual schemas are different and so just require different statements to be made.
The red-shirt statement does not refer if understood in its literal, singular sense in the crowd context. But, as you point out, it could be interpreted as referring to a subset of the crowd which could be expressed as, "some of you have red shirts". Alternatively, each person could interpret the singular statement as talking about them personally, in which case there would be multiple propositions with potentially different truth values.
This is really what is going on with the quantum counterfactual. Interpretations are being made that depend on the conceptual schema that the person holds. My view is that the wave function is real and that our conceptual schema should reflect this. On this view, there can be no fact about what would have happened to you (singular) if you had opened the Schrodinger's Cat box at an earlier time.
This conclusion is actually the basis of Bell's Theorem, where "fact" above is equivalent to "hidden variable" or "element of physical reality". Bell proved that the classical picture was incompatible with Einstein's principle of locality.
That and the cat would know whether it was dead or alive. Never knew why a cat was different from a person in this scenario, as if there's something special about human observers that cat observers lack.
I know Schrodinger's point was that it was ridiculous to think the cat would be in a superposed state of alive and dead before we look, but a lot of people have taken it to mean the opposite.
Thermal decoherence adds extra constraints on those probabilities now, keeping the weirdness suitably quantum scale. The observer/collapse issue is not solved as such, but there is a commonsense work around where the statistics of the decaying particle (which causes the rather classical death by a shattered vial of poison) gives you a good argument for how soon the death is likely to happen.
If I say "My mothers names is Anne" That could be false because my mother could have changed her name by deed poll to Susan. But It was true in the past that her name was Anne.
The laws of physics are a limited case because how many things refer to the laws of physics?
"If Germany won WW2" does not depend only on the laws of physics but on a huge range of occurrences including mental states and Historical contingencies.
If the laws of physics are certain or definite does that mean that they have been around and will be around for eternity? How many events are like this where the outcome was determined through eternity? That is to say how many laws are there with the same force.
And then there are contextual facts. Hitlers personality probably ensured that the Germans would never win WW2. If Hitler had a different psychology etc then he wouldn't be Hitler because the person we know as Hitler was defined by certain psychological traits and genetic inheritance.
So it could be "physically" impossible for the Germans to win WW2 and the only scenario in which they could have would be so radically different as to not to refer to the same things. Likewise if we said
"If Hitler had a better childhood"
Is it really possible for him to have had a different childhood without him being a different person altogether, because his parents circumstances and personalities etc would also have to be different. So I don't see that you can simply change one factor, but rather the whole causal chain would need altering.
What is it that is supposed to rest on counterfactuals?