A happy-making feature of today is that Philosophy and Phenomenological Research have just accepted my paper “Chances, Counterfactuals and Similarity”, which has been hanging around for absolutely ages, in part because I got a “revise and resubmit” just as I was finishing my thesis and starting my new job, and in part because I got so much great feedback from a referee that there was lots to think about.
The way I think about it, it is a paper in furtherance of the Lewisian project of reducing counterfactual facts to similarity-facts between worlds, which feeds into a general interest in what kinds of modal structure (cross-world identities, metrics and measures, stronger-than-modal relations etc) you need to appeal to for metaphysical purposes. Lewis has a distinctive project of trying to reduce all this apparent structure to the economical basis of de dicto modality — what’s true at this world or that — and (local) similarity facts. Counterpart theory is one element of this project: showing how cross-world identities might be replaced by similarity relations and de dicto modality. Another element is the reduction of counterfactuals to closeness of worlds, and closeness of worlds is ultimately cashed out in terms of one world’s fitting another’s laws, and there being large areas where the local facts in each world match exactly. Again, we find de dicto modality of worlds and local similarity at the base.
Lewis’s main development of this view looks at a special case, where the actual world is presupposed to have deterministic laws. But to be general (and presumably, to be applicable to the actual world!) we want to have an account that holds for the situation where the laws of nature are objective-chance-laws. Lewis does suggest a way of extending his account to the chancy case. It’s attacked by Hawthorne in a recent paper—ultimately successfully, I think. In any case, Lewis’s ideas in this area always looked (to me) like a bit of a patch-up job, so I suggest a more principled Lewisian treatment, which then avoids the Hawthorne-style objections to the Lewis original.
The basic thought (which I found in Adam Elga’s work on Humean laws of nature) is that “fitting” chancy laws of nature is not just a matter of not violating those laws. Rather, to fit a chancy law is to be objectively typical relative to the probability function those laws determine. Given this understanding, we can give a single Lewisian account of what comparative similarity of worlds amounts to, phrased in terms of fit. The ambition is that when you understand “fit” in the way appropriate to deterministic laws, you get Lewis’s original (unextended) account. And when you understand “fit” in the way I argue is appropriate to chancy laws, you get my revised suggestion. All very satisfying, if you can get it to work!
