Maverick Philosopher

Per Impossibile Counterfactual Conditionals

God is a necessary being. That means: given that God exists, it is metaphysically impossible that he not exist. My opening sentence does not imply that God exists. It merely reports on God's modal status. Let us assume both that God exists and that all truth depends on God.

How might this relation of dependence be formulated?  I find the following formulation perfectly intelligible:  if, per impossibile, God did not exist, truth would not exist either.   In fact, Aquinas says essentially this somewhere in De Veritate.  (It is near the beginning but I can't find the passage.)

The italicized sentence is an example of a per impossibile counterfactual. Here is a second:

If, per impossibile, there were no minds, there would be no mere possibilia.

What say you, Dr. Novak?

LIes and Counterfactuals

Suppose I say

1) Had Jeb Bush won the 2016 Republican  nomination, Hillary Clinton would have won the presidential election.

Suppose a Never-Trumper calls me a liar.  Have I lied?  A lie is an intentional misrepresentation of a truth known by the one who lies in order to deceive the person or persons being lied to.  Now (1) is either true or not true, but no one knows which it is. So no one can rightly call me a liar for asserting (1).  

If I am not lying when I assert (1), what am I doing?  I am offering a reasonable, but practically unverifiable, speculation.  And the same goes for a person who denies (2).

Donald Trump famously boasted, 

2) Had it not been for all the illegal votes, I would have won the popular vote as well as the electoral college vote.

Leftists, who compile long lists of Trump's supposed lies, had among their number some who counted (2) -- an accurate paraphrase of what Trump said, not an exact quotation -- as a lie.

But it is obviously not a lie. The worst you could call it is an unlikely self-serving speculation.  He did not assert something he knew to be false, he asserted something he did not know to be true.

Trump haters who compile lists of his 'lies,' need to give a little thought as to what a lie is; else their count will be wrong. 

A Per Impossibile Counterfactual

If cats had wings, they would spread them at dusk.   There is something feminine about cats, all cats, and something owlish as well. 

'Probative Overkill' Objections to the Potentiality Principle

Here is a simple version of the Potentiality Argument (PA):

1. All potential persons have a right to life.
2. The human fetus is a potential person.
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3. The human fetus has a right to life.

Does PA 'prove too much'? It does if the proponent of PA has no principled way of preventing PA from transmogrifying into something like:

1. All potential persons have a right to life.
4. Everything is a potential person.
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5. Everything has a right to life.

Modal Sentences and Truncated Counterfactual Conditionals

Let's think about the following modal sentence:

1. My expository skills could be better than they are.

(1)  is a modal sentence because of the presence in it of the modal word 'could.'  Whether or not you agree with me that (1) is true, you must concede that (1) has a definite meaning understandable by any competent speaker of the English language.  (1) is a bit of ordinary, grammatically correct English: there is nothing extraordinary or 'philosophical' about it.  Not only does (1) have a definite meaning, it has exactly one definite meaning: no question of ambiguity arises.  One cannot say that (1) is meaningless or incoherent or ambiguous.  Compare (1) with the nonmodal

2. My expository skills are better than they are.

(2) is plainly incoherent for reasons that need no belaboring.  And anyone who understands English will instantly discern the difference between (2) and (1).