Lots of counterfactuals are statements about how we think the world is connected together. We tell stories. We make analogies and metaphors.
Do you think Oswald killed Kennedy because he had free will and he chose to independent of anything else? If Kennedy died because somebody powerful and important wanted to have him killed, then if Oswald hadn’t taken the job somebody else surely would have. Maybe somebody else did and we picked up Oswald by mistake.
If Oswald did it for reasons that might influence other people too, then somebody else might very well have been influenced similarly to Oswald. Were there 5 independent lone nuts ready to kill Kennedy? 50? 500? We don’t know because the first one to do it, succeeded. If we could re-run the experiment a hundred times and it was Oswald 20% of the time versus Oswald 100% of the time, that would tell us something. If it was Oswald 30% of the time and nobody 70%, that would tell us something else. But we can’t rerun the experiment even once.
We can say what we think might have happened, based on our experience with other things applied as similes and metaphors to that one. It isn’t reliable. But it’s central to the way we think all the time.
Lots of counterfactuals are statements about how we think the world is connected together. We tell stories. We make analogies and metaphors.
Do you think Oswald killed Kennedy because he had free will and he chose to independent of anything else? If Kennedy died because somebody powerful and important wanted to have him killed, then if Oswald hadn’t taken the job somebody else surely would have. Maybe somebody else did and we picked up Oswald by mistake.
If Oswald did it for reasons that might influence other people too, then somebody else might very well have been influenced similarly to Oswald. Were there 5 independent lone nuts ready to kill Kennedy? 50? 500? We don’t know because the first one to do it, succeeded. If we could re-run the experiment a hundred times and it was Oswald 20% of the time versus Oswald 100% of the time, that would tell us something. If it was Oswald 30% of the time and nobody 70%, that would tell us something else. But we can’t rerun the experiment even once.
We can say what we think might have happened, based on our experience with other things applied as similes and metaphors to that one. It isn’t reliable. But it’s central to the way we think all the time.