Inferentialism

This chapter is dedicated to one of the most popular approaches to the question of counterfactuals. The core of this view is that the truth of a conditional is grounded in the inference between the antecedent and the consequent. The main problem is establishing the nature of this inference. In the first section, I discuss the Nelson GoodmanGoodmanNelson’s metalinguistic theory and the problem of cotenability (Sect. 2.1). The second section is dedicated to a more liberal theory, proposed by Roderick ChisholmChisholmRoderick (Sect. 2.2). Finally, based on more recent currents in the inferentialist tradition, I sketch a modern inferentialist view on counterfactuals (Sect. 2.3). I argue that despite the plausibility of inferentialism’s core, each type of this approach faces similar problems with vicious circles.