Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawa
Posted in Philosophy on Sep 19th, 2010
This post is an exercise in Williamson exegesis. I’m looking primarily at chapter five — the modal epistemology chapter — of The Philosophy of Philosophy. (That chapter substantially overlaps a couple of earlier papers as well.) As many readers will know, Williamson emphasises the equivalence of claims of metaphysical modality with particular counterfactuals (such as the [...]
Posted in Philosophy on Sep 8th, 2010
I like the approach to counterfactuals that treats them as modals. The sentence ‘if A were the case, C would be the case’ says that, out of some restricted class of possibilities, all the A possibilities are C possibilities. Which restricted class is in play is of course in part a context-sensitive matter. The relevant [...]
Posted in Philosophy on Oct 24th, 2009
I’m on the record as thinking there are tight connections between counterfactuals and knowledge. Robbie Williams, in his “Defending Conditional Excluded Middle,” denies this. At least, he argues for a strong disconnect between them. Robbie argues, among other things, that there are strong reasons to accept both (A) and (B): (A) If I were to [...]
Posted in publications on Jun 20th, 2009
Quantifiers, Knowledge, and Counterfactuals, forthcoming in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. Many of the motivations in favor of contextualism about knowledge apply also to a contextualist approach to counterfactuals. I motivate and articulate such an approach, in terms of the context-sensitive ‘all cases’, in the spirit of David Lewis’s contextualist view about knowledge. The resulting view [...]