Was not my counterfactual scenario. It was someone else describing a counterfactual where ninjas are travelling by sea to a ninja-convention. My only contribution there was to (implicitly) assert that the counterfactualising operation that preserves the most probability mass to produce that scenario would not result in ninjas travelling on unarmed ships.
I edited that; I think the daimyos did have their own navies. I’m not actually certain about that, though, and I don’t feel like looking it up. Maybe someone who knows more Japanese history can contribute. In either case, I don’t think it’s possible to say which is more probable, since whether they book passage on a merchant ship, or are sent with a naval ship by a master who controls both, depends entirely on the circumstance we concoct. Historically, they could have done both, if daimyos did have navies.
And in my experience the way people go about concocting such circumstances (in general, over all counterfactuals) matters a lot to me both in terms of how much respect I can maintain for them as a thinker and how much I can tolerate their presence. For the purpose of answering a specific question not all concocted circumstances are equal!
I edited that; I think the daimyos did have their own navies. I’m not actually certain about that, though, and I don’t feel like looking it up. Maybe someone who knows more Japanese history can contribute. In either case, I don’t think it’s possible to say which is more probable, since whether they book passage on a merchant ship, or are sent with a naval ship by a master who controls both, depends entirely on the circumstance we concoct. Historically, they could have done both, if daimyos did have navies.
And in my experience the way people go about concocting such circumstances (in general, over all counterfactuals) matters a lot to me both in terms of how much respect I can maintain for them as a thinker and how much I can tolerate their presence. For the purpose of answering a specific question not all concocted circumstances are equal!