Humean Laws in Context

Antony Eagle (University of Adelaide)

When evaluating a counterfactual, the orthodox – and correct – semantic treatment asks us to assign content to any context-sensitive expressions (even those in the consequent) relative to the actual context of utterance. But a certain intuitive heuristic about the evaluation of counterfactuals – something like, 'imagine being at the antecedent world and evaluating the consequent' – has led some to mistaken conclusions about the truth values of certain counterfactuals that are of some philosophical significance – notably counterfactuals with counternomic antecedents. Marc Lange and Ned Hall (among others) have argued that Humean accounts of laws of nature cannot predict the correct truth values for counternomic counterfactuals with counterfactuals embedded in the consequent, apparently on the basis of deploying this heuristic. Working through the semantic details a little more we can see that this charge is not well-founded, though appeal to a two-dimensional semantic framework can illuminate the reasoning Lange and Hall may be deploying. In the final section of the talk I will turn to counternomic counterfactuals with claims about objective chance in the consequent (again in a broadly Humean setting), and explore whether these observations can illuminate those conditionals and perhaps even the problem of undermining (very speculative).