Wolfgang Schwarz

Quantified counterfactuals, strict conditionals and escaping animals

Speaking of chapter six, Williamson here argues that the sentence

1) if an animal escaped from the zoo, it would be a monkey

is not adequately formalized as

1')

on the grounds that according to (1'), even the elephants are such that they would be monkeys if they escaped from the zoo. Williamson suggests that an adequate formalization might rather go like this:

1'')

where the initial quantifier oddly doesn't bind the anaphor in the consequent.

The elephant problem arises from treating the counterfactual as a variably strict conditional: for every x, we look at the closest worlds where x is an escaping animal and check if x is a monkey there. This is in line with the Lewis-Stalnaker semantics. What if counterfactuals are instead invariably strict conditionals over a contextually determined modal domain, as has been suggested every now and then, e.g. in this paper by Kai von Fintel? On this account, "if A were the case then B" is true iff B is true at all contextually relevant A-worlds. Then (1') gives the right result as long as the contextually relevant domain of worlds is extended just enough to let in some worlds where an animal escapes the zoo.

On the other hand, consider

2) every animal, if it escaped from the zoo, (it) would be shot.

This isn't true if only escaping monkeys would be shot. This time we do look, for each animal x, at the closest worlds where x escapes from the zoo. On the strict conditional view, the modal domain must somehow extend so far as to cover even escaping-elephant worlds. I'm not sure how that could be explained. Moreover, at least prima facie, (2) seems to follow from

3.1) if the monkey escaped from the zoo, it would be shot;
...
3.n) if the elephant escaped from the zoo, it would be shot;
3.n+1) there are no other animals besides the monkey and ... the elephant.

However, on the strict conditional view, (2) requires more than (3.1)-(3.n+1). It requires that even in far-fetched escaping-elephant worlds, simultaneously escaping monkeys are also shot.

If we could somehow figure out whether or not (3.1)-(3.n+1) entail (2), we would have a nice test case for the strict conditionals account vs. the Lewis-Stalnaker account.