Argumenta – Journal of Analytic Philosophy

Theoretical models are widely held as sources of knowledge of reality. Imagination is vital to their development and to the generation of plausible hypotheses about reality. But how can imagination, which is typically held to be completely free, effectively instruct us about reality? In this paper I argue that the key to answering this question is in constrained uses of imagination. More specifically, I identify make-believe as the right notion of imagination at work in modelling. I propose the first overarching taxonomy of types of constraints on scientific imagination that…

According to a recent philosophical claim, “works of fiction are thought experiments” (Elgin 2007: 47), though there are relevant differences, as the role of spoilers shows—they can ruin a novel but improve the understanding we can gain through a thought experiment. In the present article I will analyze the role of spoilers and argue for a more differentiated perspective on the relation between literature and thought experiments. I will start with a short discussion of different perspectives on thought experiments and argue that the mental-model view and the conception of…

In this paper, I present a conceptual connection between fictional disagreements and thought experiments. Fictional disagreements happen when two readers disagree about a fictional detail. The “great beetle debate” is a paradigmatic case. Nabokov once argued that Gregor Samsa, in The Metamorphosis, metamorphosed into a beetle. Yet many critics and readers imagine Gregor to be a big cockroach. Analysing a fictional disagreement is interesting because it exhibits the informational structure which is common to all fictions. First, it shows the distinction between the fictional foreground (what is expressed by the…

Counterpossibles, counterfactuals conditional with impossible antecedents, are notoriously contested; while the standard view makes them trivially true, some authors argue that they can be non-trivially true. In this paper, I examine the use of counterfactuals in the context of games, and argue that there is a case to be made for their non-triviality in a restricted sense. In particular, I examine the case of retro problems in chess, where it can happen that one is tasked with evaluating counterfactuals about illegal positions. If we understand illegality as a type of…

The subjective probability of a subjunctive conditional is argued to be equal to the expected conditional credence in its consequent, given the truth of its antecedent, of an ‘expert’: someone who reasons faultlessly and who, at each point in time, is as fully informed about the state of the world as it is possible to be at that time.

Rothschild and Spectre (2018b) present a puzzle about knowledge, probability and conditionals. This paper analyzes the puzzle and argues that it is essentially two puzzles in one: a puzzle about knowledge and probability and a puzzle about probability and conditionals. As these two puzzles share a crucial feature, this paper ends with a discussion of the prospects of solving them in a unified way.

Once upon a time, some thought that indicative conditionals could be effectively analyzed as material conditionals. Later on, an alternative theoretical construct has prevailed and received wide acceptance, namely, the conditional probability of the consequent given the antecedent. Partly following critical remarks recently appeared in the literature, we suggest that evidential support—rather than conditional probability alone—is key to understand indicative conditionals. There have been motivated concerns that a theory of evidential conditionals (unlike their more traditional counterparts) cannot generate a sufficiently interesting logical system. Here, we will describe results dispelling…

A unified shared theory of conditionals does not still exist. Some theories seem suitable only for indicative but not for counterfactual ones (or vice versa), while others work well with simple conditionals but not compound ones. Ernest Adams’ approach—one of the most successful theories as far as indicative conditional are concerned—is based on a reformulation of Ramsey’s Test in a probabilistic thesis known as “The Equation”. While the so-called Lewis’ Triviality Results support Adams’ view that conditionals do not express genuine statements, the problem arises whether these results lead inevitably…

We illustrate the notions of compound and iterated conditionals introduced, in recent papers, as suitable conditional random quantities, in the framework of coherence. We motivate our definitions by examining some concrete examples. Our logical operations among conditional events satisfy the basic probabilistic properties valid for unconditional events. We show that some, intuitively acceptable, compound sentences on conditionals can be analyzed in a rigorous way in terms of suitable iterated conditionals. We discuss the Import-Export principle, which is not valid in our approach, by also examining the inference from a material…