Counterfactuality and Epistemology

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epistemology is the branch of philosophy that attempts to answer questions on the nature and sources of knowledge; questions like that what knowledge is. The issue of the epistemological status of counterfactuality is the question whether counterfactual thinking, such as thought experiments, can lead to 'knowledge' (in an etymologically/philosophically strict sense).

Daniel Dennett famously argued against thought experiments, calling them "intuition pumps"[1]: appeals to intuition where analysis would have been more appropriate. This critique is especially damaging in combination with the more general criticism of the reliability of intuition and its use as a tool in philosophy.[2] Intuition, according to its critics (although perhaps in somewhat stronger terms), is nothing but half-conscious, oversimplified, and outdated ideas ("knowledge" from the past), or at least based thereupon.

However, this criticism applies mainly to counterfactuality (thought experiments) in philosophy. In counterfactual science (broadly understood), there is a second, and perhaps greater problem: limits to knowledge, and the consequent limits to predictability. This is a problem especially if the counterfactuality concerns a complex system. In such a case, a prediction of what something would be like based on the best scientific knowledge may still significantly deviate from what it really would be like because of oversights such as unexpected interactions between various aspects of the model/creation, or because minute variations in initial conditions radically change the outcome. Because of this, for any counterfactuality that involves (formal) complexity - and arguably that is always the case in creative counterfactuality and other forms of counterfactuality on the social and/or historical level - prediction is fundamentally impossible.[3] In other words, in complex cases, counterfactuality teaches us nothing, or at least nothing about reality: it does not result in knowledge.

Of course, for creative counterfactuality this does not matter much, although it is relevant for the common aim of realism, but it may have important implications for other forms of counterfactuality. If those cannot really result in knowledge about the real world, they are not fundamentally different from creative counterfactuality, or at least not more respectable. (They might be less respectable, actually, if they misleadingly claim to produce knowledge.) Consequently, Counterfactual history in science is not fundamentally different from its creative counterpart, and the same would apply to counterfactual geography. One may even wonder whether mainstream economics, with is elaborate mathematical modelling based on knowingly false abstractions of the real world, isn't really one big thought experiment, and therefore, not in the business of producing knowledge. (But perhaps, ideology instead, as has been claimed by some of its critics.) In other words, all counterfactuality is art, not science.

notes and links

see also:

notes:

  1. Dennett, Daniel (1991), Consciousness Explained.
  2. See especially: M. Depaul and W. Ramsey (eds) (1988), Rethinking Intuition: The Psychology of Intuition and Its Role In Philosophical Inquiry.
  3. For more on this problem, see for example, the Wikipedia pages on complexity and chaos.