Placek, Tomasz and Muller, Thomas (2005) Counterfactuals and historical possibility. [Preprint]

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Abstract

We show that truth conditions for counterfactuals need not always be given in terms of a vague notion of similarity. To this end, we single out the important class of historical counterfactuals and give formally rigorous truth conditions for these counterfactuals, employing a partial ordering relation called ``comparative closeness'' that is defined in the framework of branching space-times. Among other applications, we provide a detailed analysis of counterfactuals uttered in the context of lost bets. In an appendix we compare our theory with the branching space-times based reading of counterfactuals recently proposed by Belnap.

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Item Type:	Preprint
Creators:	Creators Email ORCID Placek, Tomasz Muller, Thomas
Keywords:	branching space-times, historical counterfactuals, comparative closeness, betting
Subjects:	General Issues > Causation General Issues > Determinism/Indeterminism
Depositing User:	Tomasz Placek
Date Deposited:	22 Apr 2005
Last Modified:	07 Oct 2010 15:13
Item ID:	2268
Subjects:	General Issues > Causation General Issues > Determinism/Indeterminism
Date:	April 2005
URI:	https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/id/eprint/2268

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