‘Could have done otherwise’, action sentences and anaphora

'Could have done otherwise', action sentences and anaphora HELEN STEWARD What does it mean to say of a certain agent, S, that he or she could have done otherwise? Clearly, it means nothing at all, unless the anaphoric devices within the sentence have been anchored to definite antecedents. In this paper, I shall argue that there may be more ways of effecting this anchoring than is commonly supposed, and hence more questions potentially available to be asked by means of the formulation 'Could S have done otherwise?' than is generally assumed to be the case in most of the relevant literature. What are the anaphoric devices whose reference needs settling before we can make an assessment of any particular 'S could have done other-wise' claim? Clearly, one such device relates to tense; 'could have' introduces a past-tense morpheme which requires some specification by an antecedent sentence of what Reichenbach calls a 'point of reference' (1947: 287–98). Temporal anaphora of this sort are interesting and complex , and have already been the subject of some scrutiny in the literature relating to 'could have done otherwise' (see e.g. Wiggins 1991: 273–74 and Chisholm 1967). I will not however say more about them here; my concern will rather be with the functioning of the verb phrase 'do other-wise', which has received less attention. What 'do otherwise' appears to demand for its sensible interpretation in the context under consideration is an antecedent sentence of the form 'S j-ed', where j is a verb of action. Given an antecedent sentence of this sort, it is natural to suppose – as is standardly assumed in the literature – that what it means to say that S could have done otherwise is that S could, at the point of reference in question, have done other than j. I do not want to deny that this is one of the things it is possible to mean by saying that 'S could have done otherwise'; nor even that it is certainly what is usually meant. But I do want to suggest that another interpretation is also available, an interpretation which can be of considerable importance in some of the philosophical contexts in which claims of the form 'S could have done otherwise' are made and assessed. It may be helpful, before I attempt to describe how this other possibility can arise, to consider another anaphoric device which very clearly …