Counterfactuals and Historical Possibility

TOMASZ PLACEK and THOMAS MÜLLER COUNTERFACTUALS AND HISTORICAL POSSIBILITY

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. Amon...

What-If at Waterloo. Carl von Clausewitz’s use of historical counterfactuals in his history of the Campaign of 1815

In this article, I analyze the use of historical counterfactuals in the Campaign of 1815 by Carl von Clausewitz (1780–1831). Such is the importance of counterfactuals in this work that its gist can be given in a series of 25 counterfactuals. I claim that a central role is played by evaluative counterfactuals. This specific form of counterfactuals is part of a didactic method that allows Clausew...

Counterfactual reasoning (philosophical aspects)—quantitative

(Philosophical Aspects)—Qualitative". Here, after a general introduction and historical overview, we emphasize the role of counterfactual reasoning within the quantitative frameworks of probability theory, decision theory, and game theory. 1. Counterfactuals Counterfactuals are a species of conditionals. They are propositions or sentences, expressed by or equivalent to subjunctive conditionals ...

Layered history: Styles of reasoning as stratified conditions of possibility

0039-3681/$ see front matter 2012 Elsevier Ltd. A http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.shpsa.2012.07.004 E-mail address: [email protected] This paper depicts Ian Hacking’s ‘styles of reasoning’ as conditions of possibility. After distinguishing between possibilities and causes, it articulates the implicit stratigraphical metaphor used to describe the relationship between different conditions of possibili...

Counterfactuals, Causal Inference, and Historical Analysis