Owing to the problem of inescapable clashes, epistemic accounts of
might-counterfactuals have recently gained traction. In a different vein,
the might argument against conditional excluded middle has rendered
the latter a contentious principle to incorporate into a logic for conditionals. The aim of this paper is to rescue both ontic mightcounterfactuals and conditional excluded middle from these disparate
debates and show them to be compatible. I argue that the antecedent of
a might-counte…
Read moreOwing to the problem of inescapable clashes, epistemic accounts of
might-counterfactuals have recently gained traction. In a different vein,
the might argument against conditional excluded middle has rendered
the latter a contentious principle to incorporate into a logic for conditionals. The aim of this paper is to rescue both ontic mightcounterfactuals and conditional excluded middle from these disparate
debates and show them to be compatible. I argue that the antecedent of
a might-counterfactual is semantically underdetermined with respect to
the counterfactual worlds it selects for evaluation. This explains how
might-counterfactuals select multiple counterfactual worlds as they apparently do and why their utterance confers a weaker alethic commitment on the speaker than does that of a would-counterfactual, as well as
provides an ontic solution to inescapable clashes. I briefly sketch how the
semantic underdetermination and truth conditions of mightcounterfactuals are regulated by conversational context.
