Counterfactuals and Historical Possibility

Placek, Tomasz; Müller, Thomas

doi:10.1007/s11229-005-0617-x

Cited by 25 publications

(18 citation statements)

References 16 publications

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“…1 There are in the literature several candidates for BST theory and several developments thereof. Consult in particular the works of Kowalski and Müller and Placek and Weiner; see especially [15,19,23,25,27,29]. Of special note are their contributions to the theory of probabilities in BST, to the theory of counterfactual conditionals in BST, and to the application to certain problems in quantum mechanics.…”

Section: Rudiments Of the Theory Of Branching Space-timesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Prolegomenon to norms in branching space–times

Belnap

2011

Journal of Applied Logic

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Section: Rudiments Of the Theory Of Branching Space-timesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Prolegomenon to norms in branching space–times

Belnap

2011

Journal of Applied Logic

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“…However, there are some initial studies of counterfactuals in the context of BT (e.g. Thomason and Gupta 1980;Øhrstrøm and Hasle 1995;Placek and Müller 2007) and they can be readily applied to our semantics. of possible uses of sentences within the TRL setting is not, in principle, doomed to failure.…”

Section: A Simple Casementioning

confidence: 99%

The Truth About the Future

Wawer

2013

Erkenn

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There is a long-standing disagreement among Branching-Time theorists. Even though they all believe that the branching representation accurately grasps the idea that the future, contrary to the past, is open, they argue whether this representation is compatible with the claim that one among many possible futures is distinguished-the single future that will come to be. This disagreement is paralleled in an argument about the bivalence of future contingents. The single, privileged future is often called the Thin Red Line. I reconstruct the history of the arguments for and against this idea. Then, I propose my own version of the Thin Red Line theory which is immune to the major objections found in the literature. I argue that the semantic disagreement is grounded in distinct metaphysical presuppositions. My solution is expressed in a conceptual framework proposed by John MacFarlane, who distinguishes semantics from postsemantics. I extend his distinction and introduce a new notion of presemantics to elucidate my idea.

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“…The proper analysis of counterfactuals in general, and in context of branching time semantics in particular, is a rather complex issue (see e.g. Thomason and Gupta 1980;Placek and Müller 2007). Belnap is openly sceptical about formal counterfactual connectives (see his contribution to this issue) and so is plausibly read as not requiring that defenders of the TRL provide a full theory of counterfactuals.…”

Section: Solutions To the First Problemmentioning

confidence: 99%

A future for the thin red line

Malpass

Wawer

2012

Synthese

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The thin red line (TRL) is a theory about the semantics of future-contingents. The central idea is that there is such a thing as the 'actual future', even in the presence of indeterminism. It is inspired by a famous solution to the problem of divine foreknowledge associated with William of Ockham, in which the freedom of agents is argued to be compatible with God's omniscience. In the modern branching time setting, the theory of the TRL is widely regarded to suffer from several fundamental problems. In this paper we propose several new TRL semantics, each with differing degrees of success. This leads up to our final semantics, which is a cross between the TRL and supervaluationism. We discuss the notions of truth, validity and semantic consequence which result from our final semantics, and demonstrate some of its pleasing results. This account, we believe, answers the main objection in the literature, and thus places the TRL on the same level as any other competing semantics for future contingents.

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Counterfactuals and Historical Possibility

Cited by 25 publications

References 16 publications

Prolegomenon to norms in branching space–times

Prolegomenon to norms in branching space–times

The Truth About the Future

A future for the thin red line

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