So things have been a little quiet on this blog lately. This is a combination of (a) trips away, (b) doing administration-stuff for the Analysis Trust, and (c) the fact that I’m entering the “writing up” phase of my current research leave.
I’ve got a whole heap of papers that in various stages of completion that I want to get finished up. As I post drafts online, the blogging should become more regular. So here’s the first installment—a new version of an older paper that discusses conditional excluded middle, and in particular, a certain style of argument that Lewis deploys against it, and which Bennett endorses (in an interestingly varied form) in his survey book.
What I try to do in the present version—apart from setting out some reasons for being interested in conditional excluded middle for counterfactuals that I think deserve more attention—is try to disentangle two elements of Bennett’s discussion. One element is a certain narrow-scope analysis of “might”-counterfactuals (roughly: “if it were that P it might be that Q” has the form: 
One thing I argue is that Bennett’s Hypothesis all on its own conflicts with conditional excluded middle. And without Bennett’s Hypothesis, there’s really no argument from the narrow-scope analysis alone against conditional excluded middle. So really, if counterfactuals work the way Bennett thinks they do, we can forget about the fine details of analyzing epistemic modals when arguing against conditional excluded middle. All the action is with whether or not we’ve got grounds to endorse the epistemic constraint on counterfactual truth.
The second thing I argue is that there are reasons to be severely worried about Bennett’s Hypothesis—it threatens to lead us straight into an error theory about ordinary counterfactual judgements.
If people are interested, the current version of the paper is available here. Any thoughts gratefully received!
J Robert G Williams 