WiP - Harjit Bhogal & Paolo Santorio / Higher-level laws and partial possibility
WiP - Harjit Bhogal & Paolo Santorio / Higher-level laws and partial possibility
Wednesday October 8, our Works in Progress meeting features the duo of Harjit Bhogal and Paolo Santorio, on the topic of "Higher-level laws and partial possibility."
We present a puzzle about laws and counterfactuals. Take a counterfactual that is entailed by laws of a higher-level science, like economics, statistics, or biology: for example, "If I flipped this coin a million times, the chance of it landing heads at least 100k times would be X". Given plausible background assumptions, many counterfactuals of this form contradict counterfactuals entailed by more fundamental sciences, such as physics. Intuitively, the problem is due to the fact that these higher-level counterfactuals involve idealization. But there is no easy, straightforward way to capture the relevant notion of idealization in standard frameworks for modal talk. We suggest that the solution is to introduce a notion of partial possibility. The possibilities considered by our problematic counterfactuals are partial in the sense that they disregard (in a way to be made precise) more fundamental facts and more fundamental laws.