Now Playing: COUNTERFACTUALS WEEK (REPOSTED FOR THE 2ND TIME)
Topic: Counterfactuals
SIMILARITY IS A BAD GUIDE TO COUNTERFACTUAL TRUTH
By Douglas Kutach
A prominent strategy for evaluating whether a counterfactual's truth is to seek out the most similar worlds where the antecedent is true, with similarity given by some theory. I discuss a few new counterexamples to Lewis' theory of overall similarity that are more compelling than other counterexamples because they indicate that a system like Lewis' cannot be fixed. The problem with the similarity approach is that it too narrowly limits the ways we can interpret counterfactual conditionals.
Source: Online Papers in Philosophy
Reposted firstly on March the 11th, 2005
Posted by Tony Marmo
at 00:01 GMT
Updated: Wednesday, 11 January 2006 04:35 GMT
