The Importance of Counterfactual Comparisons

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"I think it was a very successful speech because it brings up what I think is something to help you fall asleep at night when you're worrying about whether any of this is useful," he says. "What we care about are questions like, did this patient get better because we gave them this medicine? And that's an equally counterfactual question." He adds: "Even though we're playing games with the metaphysics to make it dramatic, the underlying issues are kind of pretty down to earth"

Is metaphysics like physics, but cooler? Or is it a relic of an outdated, pre-empirical way of thinking about the world? Closer to the former than the latter. Rather than building specific quantitative theories about the world, metaphysics aims to get a handle on the basic logical structures that help us think about it. I talk with philosopher Katie Elliott on how metaphysics helps us think about questions like counterfactuals, possible worlds, time travel, mathematical equivalence, and whether everything happens for a reason.

Blog post with transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2023/07/24/244-katie-elliott-on-metaphysics-chance-and-time/

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Katrina (Katie) Elliott received her Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. After being an assistant professor of philosophy at UCLA, she is now on the faculty at Brandeis. Her research covers topics in metaphysics and the philosophy of science, including explanation, chances, and the logic of time travel.

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