Counterfactuals and Probability
1st Edition
Published on 19. January 2017
256 pages
978-0-19-108906-0 (ISBN)
Description
Moritz Schulz explores counterfactual thought and language: what would have happened if things had gone a different way. Counterfactual questions may concern large scale derivations (what would have happened if Nixon had launched a nuclear attack) or small scale evaluations of minor derivations (what would have happened if I had decided to join a different profession). A common impression, which receives a thorough defence in the book, is that oftentimes we find it impossible to know what would have happened. However, this does not mean that we are completely at a loss: we are typically capable of evaluating counterfactual questions probabilistically: we can say what would have been likely or unlikely to happen.
Schulz describes these probabilistic ways of evaluating counterfactual questions and turns the data into a novel account of the workings of counterfactual thought.
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Moritz Schulz
Counterfactuals and Probability
Software
03/2017
Oxford University Press, USA
€71.62
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Moritz Schulz
Counterfactuals and Probability
Book
02/2017
Oxford University Press
€102.10
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Person
Moritz Schulz studied Mathematics and Philosophy at the University of Hamburg before completing a BPhil at Oxford University. Shultz received his PhD from the Humboldt University of Berlin in 2011. Since then, he completed a post-doc at the University of Barcelona and acted as an assistant at the University of Tübingen before taking up his current role as junior professor at the University of Hamburg.
Content
- 1: Introduction
- 2: The Problem of Evaluating Counterfactuals
- 3: Counterfactual Chances
- 4: A Puzzle About Counterfactuals
- 5: Restriction and Modification
- 6: Counterfactuals and Arbitrariness
- 7: Applications
- 8: Triviality
- 9: Concluding Remarks
