There are many philosophical questions that I wish I could ask David Lewis. Several of them concern counterfactuals. They include the following: · You came very close to the view that most counterfactuals are false at points in your writings. Why didn’t you take the extra step and endorse the view? · You were famously a contextualist about counterfactuals, yet that seems in tension with various things that you say. How much of a contextualist were you? · You were not a contextualist at all about indicative conditionals. Why did you give such different analyses of counterfactuals and indicative conditionals? · I also have some questions about the logic of counterfactuals, concerning their antecedents. What do you make of objections to your treatment of antecedent strengthening, simplification of disjunctive antecedents, counterfactuals with true antecedents, and counterfactuals with impossible antecedents? I did get to ask David why he liked Australia so much, and I will share his answer.
Suppose Colin and Frank are both in their offices. Colin flipped a fair coin and it landed heads. Frank didn't scratch his nose. Assuming their offices are causally isolated, the following counterfactual seems true:
(1) Had Frank scratched his nose, Colin's coin still would have landed heads.
The intuition that (1) and counterfactuals like it are true motivates a general principle:
Causal Independence Principle (CIP): If A and C are true, and the mechanisms settling whether A and whether C are causally independent, then: if A had been false, C would still have been true.
I find CIP extremely plausible. Unfortunately, I'll argue it's false. I'll first rehearse an old argument against CIP, and then outline a better one, both based on considerations about chance. While this argument assumes the controversial principle 'Duality', I'll argue that views rejecting Duality fare even worse if CIP is assumed true. After briefly arguing against other views on which CIP fails, I’ll offer my own account: CIP seems true because counterfactual truth depends on which facts context tells us to hold fixed. While Context often requires keeping facts causally independent from the antecedent fixed, it need not.
The term ‘meaning’ has a broad and expansive scope. Linguists and philosophers sometimes focus on some notion of literal or conventional meaning described under the heading ‘semantics’ while being well aware of various phenomena falling under the heading of ‘pragmatics’, including metaphor, emotive meanings, social and political meanings and so forth. We need to think where there are the best prospects for developing systematic theories. My focus will be mostly on the semantics, using as a lens a rough contrast between the inner, that is a mental or psychological basis of meaning and the outer, which can include the behavioural, the physical context and broader social context of an utterance. Arguably a satisfactory account of meaning will involve a suitable interaction between the inner and the outer. As an example, I shall briefly discuss a familiar style of truth conditions approach to meaning with a look at the notion of direct reference to see how different styles of theory can be appropriate for different purposes.
Ludwig Wittgenstein’s notion of Philosophy of language forms a very important component of the study is the Tractatus. The earlier theory provides the philosophical background to the later concept of language of meaning and truth. The two are conceptually linked up for truth and reality. The main objectives of Tractatus is to construct an ideal language with view describe the world. Wittgenstein’s argument is that the world consists of a multitude of empirical facts and state of affairs and the truth function of language is a copy, mirror or representation these facts and state of affairs in the same way as a picture of the world or a photograph said to be representing something in the world. Language fails to function in this way because of its inherent ambiguities and vagueness. In order to remove these defects the only option left is to construct ideal language to be governed logical grammar and syntax. Language consisting primarily of an elementary proposition and names which assert the nature of things or state of affairs. The linguistic programme of the Tractatus offers a conception of philosophy. The construction of purified language is taken to be the task of philosophy.
Prof. L. Udaya Kumar M.A, M.Phil., Ph.D. (UOH)Professor of PhilosophyHead of the Department Vice-Principal, University College of Arts, Commerce & LawChairman UG and PG Discipline of Philosophy in AP.Department of Buddhist Studies,Acharya Nagarjuna... Read More →
