Backdoor Broadcasting Company

Event Date: 21 November 2011
Senate House
University of London
London WC1E 7HU

David Barnett
Counterfactual Entailment

Counterfactual Entailment is the view that a counterfactual conditional is true just in case its antecedent entails its consequent. I present an argument for Counterfactual Entailment, and I develop a strategy for explaining away apparent counterexamples to the view. The strategy appeals to the suppositional view of counterfactuals, on which a counterfactual is essentially a statement, made relative to the supposition of its antecedent, of its consequent.

David Barnett is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Prior to arriving at CU in 2005, he held positions at the University Vermont and Davidson College. In 2008, he was a visiting professor at NYU, where he obtained his PhD in in 2003. Barnett works mainly in philosophy of language and metaphysics, but also has interests in philosophy of mind. He has written on the nature of indeterminacy and vagueness, the necessity of origins thesis, the theory of stuffs, scientific essentialism, the nature of conscious beings, personal identity, and the semantics of conditional statements. He is currently developing a novel theory of content.

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