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On Lewis, Schaffer and the Non‐Reductive Evaluation of Counterfactuals
Author(s) -
NORTHCOTT ROBERT
Publication year - 2009
Publication title -
theoria
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.34
H-Index - 16
eISSN - 1755-2567
pISSN - 0040-5825
DOI - 10.1111/j.1755-2567.2009.01050.x
Subject(s) - counterfactual conditional , counterexample , counterfactual thinking , mathematical economics , causation , argument (complex analysis) , law and economics , epistemology , philosophy , mathematics , economics , discrete mathematics , biochemistry , chemistry
Jonathan Schaffer (2004) proposes an ingenious amendment to David Lewis's semantics for counterfactuals. This amendment explicitly invokes the notion of causal independence, thus giving up Lewis's ambitions for a reductive counterfactual account of causation. But in return, it rescues Lewis's semantics from extant counterexamples. I present a new counterexample that defeats even Schaffer's amendment. Further, I argue that a better approach would be to follow the causal modelling literature and evaluate counterfactuals via an explicit postulated causal structure. This alternative approach easily resolves the new counterexample, as well as all the previous ones. Up to now, its perceived drawback relative to Lewis's scheme has been its non‐reductiveness. But since the same drawback applies equally to Schaffer's amended scheme, this becomes no longer a point of comparative disadvantage.