What is it about?
Events happen all the time, and they happen a specific way: the score in the game was 3-1, the party went on until 1am, and the alarm went off during the exam. But it seems obvious that they could have happened differently: it could have been 3-2 but for a bad off-side decision, or it could have gone on later if the host hadn't gotten drunk etc. How are we to understand those 'could have been' claims? In this paper I argue that an influential idea (counterpart theory) about how we think of how objects could have been different, also works for events. This idea also fits well with an influential theory about causation. The combination of the two is especially compelling.
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Why is it important?
This paper is important because it tells us how to understand disagreements about what could have been. These disagreements are at the root of certain kinds of disagreements about what caused what, and may well influence how we report on accidents, or how we describe events in legal contexts. These implications are not touched on in the paper, however.
Perspectives
This paper is important to a wider theory I have about causation, and it is the first, and easiest to argue, step in communicating that theory. Once we view events in this counterpart-theoretic way, certain puzzles about how we think about causation start making a lot more sense.
Dr Neil McDonnell
Universitat Hamburg
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Events and their counterparts, Philosophical Studies, August 2015, Springer Science + Business Media,
DOI: 10.1007/s11098-015-0547-5.
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