Counterfactuals

Counterfactuals are central topics in philosophical logic, formal semantics, and philosophy of language. In particular, several conditional logics have been developed specifically to study counterfactuals. Early work treated them as a challenge for the analysis of conditionals in terms of the material conditional, which would make all counterfactuals with false antecedents trivially true. Subsequent research developed a range of non-truth-functional accounts, especially possible world approaches such as David Lewis's variably strict analysis and Stalnaker's closest-world semantics, as well as alternatives based on strict conditionals, causal models, and belief revision and the Ramsey test.