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A survey of David Lewis's theory of counterfactuals: resolved difficulties and resilient obstacles
| dc.creator | Botham, Thad M | |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2012-06-07T22:55:00Z | |
| dc.date.available | 2012-06-07T22:55:00Z | |
| dc.date.created | 1999 | |
| dc.date.issued | 1999 | |
| dc.identifier.uri | https://hdl.handle.net/1969.1/ETD-TAMU-1999-THESIS-B68 | |
| dc.description | Due to the character of the original source materials and the nature of batch digitization, quality control issues may be present in this document. Please report any quality issues you encounter to digital@library.tamu.edu, referencing the URI of the item. | en |
| dc.description | Includes bibliographical references (leaves 92-97). | en |
| dc.description.abstract | David Lewis [1973b] offers a possible worlds approach to a theory of counterfactuals. He attempts to specify necessary and sufficient conditions according to which a given counterfactual is true or false. My profit surveys Lewis's theory of counterfactuals in detail. Although for the most part I defend Lewis's account from several objectors, in the final chapter I reason that his theory is susceptible to a severe skepticism, which threatens any philosophical theory that relies on Lewis's theory to distinguish between non-paradigmatically true and false counterfactuals. As for the more sympathetic portion of my project, while I show how Lewis's canonical account cannot handle some paradigmatically false counterfactuals-viz., those containing true components-I try to repair his analysis in the spirit of Alan Penczek (1997). I then discuss Lewis's extension or enhancement to his original theory, which he gives in order to foil an objection advanced by Kit Fine (1975) and Jonathan Bennett (1974). Finally, I outline and raise several worries inherent in Bennett's rival theory (1984). As for the less then sympathetic section of this paper, I exploit arguments put forward by G. Lee Bowie (1979) as well as by Daniel Krasner and Mark Heller (1994), which are designed to undermine any systematic procedure to circumscribe Lewis's crucial three-place comparative similarity relation between possible worlds. | en |
| dc.format.medium | electronic | en |
| dc.format.mimetype | application/pdf | |
| dc.language.iso | en_US | |
| dc.publisher | Texas A&M University | |
| dc.rights | This thesis was part of a retrospective digitization project authorized by the Texas A&M University Libraries in 2008. Copyright remains vested with the author(s). It is the user's responsibility to secure permission from the copyright holder(s) for re-use of the work beyond the provision of Fair Use. | en |
| dc.subject | philosophy. | en |
| dc.subject | Major philosophy. | en |
| dc.title | A survey of David Lewis's theory of counterfactuals: resolved difficulties and resilient obstacles | en |
| dc.type | Thesis | en |
| thesis.degree.discipline | philosophy | en |
| thesis.degree.name | M.A. | en |
| thesis.degree.level | Masters | en |
| dc.type.genre | thesis | en |
| dc.type.material | text | en |
| dc.format.digitalOrigin | reformatted digital | en |
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