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Single Idea 22281

[filed under theme 10. Modality / B. Possibility / 8. Conditionals / c. Truth-function conditionals ]

Full Idea

What the material conditional most significantly fails to capture is counterfactual reasoning.

Gist of Idea

A material conditional cannot capture counterfactual reasoning

Source

Michael Potter (The Rise of Analytic Philosophy 1879-1930 [2020], 04 'Sem')

Book Ref

Potter,Michael: 'The Rise of Anaytic Philosophy 1879-1930' [Routledge 2020], p.34

A Reaction

The point is that counterfactuals say 'if P were the case (which it isn't), then Q'. But that means P is false, and in the material conditional everything follows from a falsehood. A reinterpretation of the conditional might embrace counterfactuals.

The 17 ideas from 'The Rise of Analytic Philosophy 1879-1930'

22273 Traditionally there are twelve categories of judgement, in groups of three [Potter]
22279 Frege's sign |--- meant judgements, but the modern |- turnstile means inference, with intecedents [Potter]
22281 A material conditional cannot capture counterfactual reasoning [Potter]
22283 Compositionality should rely on the parsing tree, which may contain more than sentence components [Potter]
22282 'Direct compositonality' says the components wholly explain a sentence meaning [Potter]
22284 'Greater than', which is the ancestral of 'successor', strictly orders the natural numbers [Potter]
22285 Impredicative definitions are circular, but fine for picking out, rather than creating something [Potter]
22291 Deductivism can't explain how the world supports unconditional conclusions [Potter]
22287 If 'concrete' is the negative of 'abstract', that means desires and hallucinations are concrete [Potter]
22290 The phrase 'the concept "horse"' can't refer to a concept, because it is saturated [Potter]
22295 Modern logical truths are true under all interpretations of the non-logical words [Potter]
22296 Compositionality is more welcome in logic than in linguistics (which is more contextual) [Potter]
22298 Why is fictional arithmetic applicable to the real world? [Potter]
22301 The Identity Theory says a proposition is true if it coincides with what makes it true [Potter]
22310 The formalist defence against Gödel is to reject his metalinguistic concept of truth [Potter]
22324 It has been unfortunate that externalism about truth is equated with correspondence [Potter]
22327 Knowledge from a drunken schoolteacher is from a reliable and unreliable process [Potter]