Chances, Counterfactuals, and Similarity

Several philosophers have claimed that S knows p only if S' s belief is safe, where S's belief is safe iff (roughly) in nearby possible worlds in which S believes p, p is true. One widely held intuition many people have is that one cannot know that one's lottery ticket will lose a fair lottery prior to an announcement of the winner, regardless of how probable it is that it will lose. Duncan Pritchard has claimed that a chief advantage of safety theory is that it can explain the lottery intuition without succumbing to skepticism. I argue that Pritchard is wrong. If a version of safety theory can explain the lottery intuition, it will also lead to skepticism.

Section: Objection: Quantum Lotteries Quasi-miracles and Atypicalitymentioning

confidence: 93%

“…(Note: Some readers may want to object to my argument by appealing to the notion of quasi-miracles in Lewis (1986) or to the distinction between typicality and atypicality in Williams (2008). I will discuss this objection in Sect.…”

Section: Real World Applications Of the Modelmentioning

confidence: 99%

Safety, Skepticism, and Lotteries

Dodd

2011

“…Worlds where a black card is drawn may vary in many ways-which black card is drawn, whether I scratch my nose immediately beforehand, and so forth-but none of these look like the sort of thing that could plausibly make the difference to the conditional being true or false. 13 Let's emphasize this feature of the intended setting: 11 Williams (2008a) argues that in some superficially similar cases, there are in fact features to which we can appeal to push worlds further away. If certain worlds are objectively atypical relative to the objective chances, they can be pushed further out.…”

Section: Thesismentioning

confidence: 96%

Vagueness, Conditionals and Probability

Williams

2009

This paper explores the interaction of well-motivated (if controversial) principles governing the probability conditionals, with accounts of what it is for a sentence to be indefinite. The conclusion can be played in a variety of ways. It could be regarded as a new reason to be suspicious of the intuitive data about the probability of conditionals; or, holding fixed the data, it could be used to give traction on the philosophical analysis of a contentious notion-indefiniteness. The paper outlines the various options, and shows that 'rejectionist' theories of indefiniteness are incompatible with the results. Rejectionist theories include popular accounts such as supervaluationism, non-classical truth-value gap theories, and accounts of indeterminacy that centre on rejecting the law of excluded middle. An appendix compares the results obtained here with the 'impossibility' results descending from Lewis (1976).

“…4 I am not the first to respond to counterfactual skepticism. To take just a few examples, David Lewis (1979), Anthony Gillies (2007), Robbie Williams (2008), Jonathan Ichikawa (2011), Hannes Leitgeb (2012aLeitgeb ( , 2012b, Sarah Moss (2012Moss ( , 2013, Moritz Schulz (2014), and Karen Lewis (2016) all offer responses to arguments for counterfactual skepticism. While these proposals are certainly very interesting and worthy of a detailed discussion, I will have to set them aside in this paper, due to lack of space.…”

Section: The Skeptical Challengementioning

confidence: 99%

Counterfactual Skepticism and Multidimensional Semantics

Stefánsson

2017

It has recently been argued that indeterminacy and indeterminism make most ordinary counterfactuals false. I argue that a plausible way to avoid such counterfactual skepticism is to postulate the existence of primitive modal facts that serve as truth-makers for counterfactual claims. Moreover, I defend a new theory of 'might' counterfactuals, and develop assertability and knowledge criteria to suit such unobservable 'counterfacts'.