Counterfactuals and Probability

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.

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.

- 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