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Single Idea 15724

[filed under theme 10. Modality / B. Possibility / 9. Counterfactuals ]

Full Idea

The subjunctive conditional has no place in an austere canonical notation for science - but that ban is less restrictive than would at first appear.

Gist of Idea

Counterfactuals have no place in a strict account of science

Source

Willard Quine (Word and Object [1960], §46)

Book Ref

Quine,Willard: 'Word and Object' [MIT 1969], p.225

A Reaction

Idea 15723 shows what he has in mind - that what science aims for is accounts of dispositional mechanisms, which then leave talk of other possible worlds (in Lewis style) as unnecessary. I may be with Quine one this one.

Related Idea

Idea 15723 Either dispositions rest on structures, or we keep saying 'all things being equal' [Quine]

The 29 ideas from 'Word and Object'

6891 Quine's naturalistic and empirical view is based entirely on first-order logic and set theory [Quine, by Mautner]
4630 Two theories can be internally consistent and match all the facts, yet be inconsistent with one another [Quine, by Baggini /Fosl]
3131 Quine expresses the instrumental version of eliminativism [Quine, by Rey]
3988 Indeterminacy of translation also implies indeterminacy in interpreting people's mental states [Dennett on Quine]
6310 Enquiry needs a conceptual scheme, so we should retain the best available [Quine]
6311 The firmer the links between sentences and stimuli, the less translations can diverge [Quine]
6312 We can never precisely pin down how to translate the native word 'Gavagai' [Quine]
6313 Stimulus synonymy of 'Gavagai' and 'Rabbit' does not even guarantee they are coextensive [Quine]
6314 Weird translations are always possible, but they improve if we impose our own logic on them [Quine]
6317 Dispositions to speech behaviour, and actual speech, are never enough to fix any one translation [Quine]
6315 We should be suspicious of a translation which implies that a people have very strange beliefs [Quine]
12798 Plurals can in principle be paraphrased away altogether [Quine]
16462 The quest for ultimate categories is the quest for a simple clear pattern of notation [Quine]
8464 Physical objects in space-time are just events or processes, no matter how disconnected [Quine]
8482 Mathematicians must be rational but not two-legged, cyclists the opposite. So a mathematical cyclist? [Quine]
12136 Cyclist are not actually essentially two-legged [Brody on Quine]
8504 Quine aims to deal with properties by the use of eternal open sentences, or classes [Quine, by Devitt]
15720 What stays the same in assessing a counterfactual antecedent depends on context [Quine]
15725 Normal conditionals have a truth-value gap when the antecedent is false. [Quine]
15724 Counterfactuals have no place in a strict account of science [Quine]
15722 Conditionals are pointless if the truth value of the antecedent is known [Quine]
15719 We feign belief in counterfactual antecedents, and assess how convincing the consequent is [Quine]
15721 Counterfactuals are plausible when dispositions are involved, as they imply structures [Quine]
15723 Either dispositions rest on structures, or we keep saying 'all things being equal' [Quine]
15490 Explain unmanifested dispositions as structural similarities to objects which have manifested them [Quine, by Martin,CB]
17594 We can paraphrase 'x=y' as a sequence of the form 'if Fx then Fy' [Quine]
7924 The notion of a physical object is by far the most useful one for science [Quine]
17905 Any progression will do nicely for numbers; they can all then be used to measure multiplicity [Quine]
9556 Nearly all of mathematics has to quantify over abstract objects [Quine]