Abstract

John Hawthorne in a recent paper takes issue with Lewisian accounts of counterfactuals, when relevant laws of nature are chancy. I respond to his arguments on behalf of the Lewisian, and conclude that while some can be rebutted, the case against the original Lewisian account is strong. I develop a neo-Lewisian account of what makes for closeness of worlds. I argue that my revised version avoids Hawthorne’s challenges. I argue that this is closer to the spirit of Lewis’s first (non-chancy) proposal than is Lewis’s own suggested modification. 1 Counterfactuals and Chance The antecedents of some counterfactual statements render their consequent hugely probable, but not certainly true. That is, it is not impossible that a combination of unlikely coincidences could lead to a situation in which the antecedent is true and the consequent false. For example: (A) If I were to toss this fair coin 10,000,000 times, it would not come up heads every time.

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