Taking counterfactuals seriously
Ordinary language traffics freely in counterfactual conditionals: “If…then…” statements whose “If” part is clearly false. To adapt an example from an earlier post, “If the ball hadn’t been caught, it would have fallen.” I denied that conditional. Not because uncaught balls float in midair, but because the ball that was actually caught wouldn’t have existed at all had it not been caught.
I recognize that my take on counterfactual conditionals (“counterfactuals,” for short) is unorthodox. Ordinarily, when we assert “If the ball hadn’t been caught, it would have fallen,” we just stipulate that the one important difference from actuality is that the ball isn’t caught. We ignore the other important differences that determinism says this one difference would require.
But if we take counterfactuals seriously and literally, we don’t get to ignore those other differences. Instead, knowing that the history of the universe necessitated the ball’s being caught, we ask what kind of history would necessitate its not being caught instead. The answer, as I’ll explain in later posts, is “a very different history” ‒ so different that the ball never exists in the first place. A ball that never exists never falls.
We need to get serious. Our everyday handling of counterfactuals isn’t quite as undisciplined as this, but it’s not far off.
