I agree with almost everything you’ve written in this comment.
I think you’re right that I am brushing over some differences between different kinds of counterfactuals a bit too much here. If you know of any articles that do a good job of separating out the different kinds of counterfactuals, then that’s something I’d really appreciate having.
Thinking over this again, it might have been better if I had written that (1) humans seem to have some kind of inner simulator and that (2) one of its main properties is that it is able to simulate situations that aren’t actually true. In fact, if this simulator only worked for simulating the actual world, it’d be pretty useless as we are mistaken about some facts, and for other facts, we need to use our best guess.
Further, I could claim that (3) this simulator plays an incredibly fundamental and core part of human thought as opposed to say, our understanding of music or Russian history, such that it’s difficult to talk about this simulator without “using its own language” so to speak.
I’m open to the possibility that we might have multiple simulators, such as counterfactual mathematical statements being handled by a different system than counterfactual statements of the world. In fact, these days I tend to make a distinction between our evolved intuitions regarding counterfactuals and the higher-level cognitive concept of counterfactuals that we’ve built up from these intuitions.
I also like your almost Wittgenstenian-language game model of counterfactuals. I agree that there are a lot of social conventions around how counterfactuals are constructed and that in a lot of circumstances, people aren’t really aiming to produce a consistent counterfactual. Hmm… I probably needed to engage with that more for one of my most recent posts on counterfactuals. In that post, I provided an argument for consistent counterfactuals, but I’m now thinking that I need to think more about what circumstances we actually want consistency and in which circumstances we don’t really care.
All this said, I don’t agree with the claim that these definitions don’t have very much to do with each other, although maybe you meant this in a sense other than I’m taking it here. I believe that different notions of counterfactual are likely built upon the same underlying intuitions, such that these definitions are likely to be very closely related.
I agree with almost everything you’ve written in this comment.
I think you’re right that I am brushing over some differences between different kinds of counterfactuals a bit too much here. If you know of any articles that do a good job of separating out the different kinds of counterfactuals, then that’s something I’d really appreciate having.
Thinking over this again, it might have been better if I had written that (1) humans seem to have some kind of inner simulator and that (2) one of its main properties is that it is able to simulate situations that aren’t actually true. In fact, if this simulator only worked for simulating the actual world, it’d be pretty useless as we are mistaken about some facts, and for other facts, we need to use our best guess.
Further, I could claim that (3) this simulator plays an incredibly fundamental and core part of human thought as opposed to say, our understanding of music or Russian history, such that it’s difficult to talk about this simulator without “using its own language” so to speak.
I’m open to the possibility that we might have multiple simulators, such as counterfactual mathematical statements being handled by a different system than counterfactual statements of the world. In fact, these days I tend to make a distinction between our evolved intuitions regarding counterfactuals and the higher-level cognitive concept of counterfactuals that we’ve built up from these intuitions.
I also like your almost Wittgenstenian-language game model of counterfactuals. I agree that there are a lot of social conventions around how counterfactuals are constructed and that in a lot of circumstances, people aren’t really aiming to produce a consistent counterfactual. Hmm… I probably needed to engage with that more for one of my most recent posts on counterfactuals. In that post, I provided an argument for consistent counterfactuals, but I’m now thinking that I need to think more about what circumstances we actually want consistency and in which circumstances we don’t really care.
All this said, I don’t agree with the claim that these definitions don’t have very much to do with each other, although maybe you meant this in a sense other than I’m taking it here. I believe that different notions of counterfactual are likely built upon the same underlying intuitions, such that these definitions are likely to be very closely related.