Now Playing: COUNTERFACTUALS WEEK (UPDATED)
Topic: Counterfactuals
Reason Explanations and Counterfactuals
By Robert M. Gordon
In evaluating conditionals concerning what a person would have done in counterfactual circumstances, we suppose the counterfactual antecedent to be true, just as in what I loosely term the standard "Ramsey" procedure; but then we follow a different path? a simulative path? in evaluating the consequent. The simulative path imposes an implicit restriction on possible worlds, a procedural guarantee that the individual simulated is aware of or knows about the counterfactual condition. This difference makes clear the way in which reason explanations are implicitly cognitive and psychological.
This implicit cognitivity has important consequences for conceptual development. If young children, even children of 2 or 3 years, follow the simulative path in interpreting counterfactuals about human action under counterfactual conditions, then they already give implicitly cognitive explanations. Their subsequent developmental task is chiefly to make explicit what they already ascribe implicitly. This will be is a process of subtraction, of shaving away some of the commitments a reason explanation makes.(...)
Posted by Tony Marmo
at 00:01 GMT
Updated: Sunday, 4 December 2005 07:12 GMT
