Towards a Property Theoretic Account of Counterfactuals
W.
Russ Payne
University of California, Davis
In his classic Fact Fiction and Forecast (1955), Nelson Goodman presents two problems of counterfactuals. One of these, dubbed “the problem of relevant conditions,” is the problem of determining what conditions are supposed to obtain under counterfactual antecedents. The other, dubbed “the problem of law,” is the problem of providing an account of laws that is adequate for ensuring that the consequents of counterfactuals would be true had the relevant conditions held in conjunction with the counterfactual’s antecedent. In this paper, I consider how both regularity treatments of laws and “realist” accounts of laws as relations between universals fail to adequately resolve Goodman’s problem of law. The dispositional essentialist’s view that laws are necessarily true accounts of the essential natures of dispositional universals is then considered. I argue that the dispositional essentialist’s view of laws does solve the problem of law, but it does so at the cost of further complicating the problem of relevant conditions. Dispositional essentialists have yet to provide an account of counterfactuals that adequately treats both of Goodman's problems of counterfactuals. In concluding this paper, I attempt to advance that project by sketching a property theoretic account of counterfactuals.