I believe that we need to take a Conceputal Engineering approach here. That is, I don’t see counterfactuals as intrinsically part of the world, but rather someone we construct. The question to answer is what purpose are we constructing these for? Once we’ve answer this question, we’ll be 90% of the way towards constructing them.
As far as I can see, the answer is that we imagine a set of possible worlds and we notice that agents that use certain notions of counterfactuals tend to perform better than agents that don’t. Of course, this raises the question of which possible worlds to consider, at which point we notice that this whole thing is somewhat circular.
However, this is less problematic than people think. Just as we can only talk about what things are true after already having taken some assumptions to be true (see Where Recursive Justification hits Bottom), it seems plausible that we might only be able to talk about possibility after having already taken some things to be possible.
I believe that we need to take a Conceputal Engineering approach here. That is, I don’t see counterfactuals as intrinsically part of the world, but rather someone we construct. The question to answer is what purpose are we constructing these for? Once we’ve answer this question, we’ll be 90% of the way towards constructing them.
As far as I can see, the answer is that we imagine a set of possible worlds and we notice that agents that use certain notions of counterfactuals tend to perform better than agents that don’t. Of course, this raises the question of which possible worlds to consider, at which point we notice that this whole thing is somewhat circular.
However, this is less problematic than people think. Just as we can only talk about what things are true after already having taken some assumptions to be true (see Where Recursive Justification hits Bottom), it seems plausible that we might only be able to talk about possibility after having already taken some things to be possible.