Quine does not like counterfactuals. ~ He thinks them unclear, and so he eschews them. It is enough, he thinks, for science to say of what it is that it is and that it is all that is. There is no need to say of what is not that it is not, or even worse, to say of what is not what it would be if things were other than they are. Quine is, of course prepared to use counterfactuals in the short run, but ultimately they must be abandoned altogether.
Other philosophers, including some of Quine's friends, urge that counterfactuals are so useful, both in science and in everyday life, that Quine should relax his strict standards and embrace whatever unclarity may result. Though friendly to at least some counterfactuals, I shall not go so far. I shall urge instead that a plausible account of counterfactuals can be given using only resources already available within Quine's philosophy. This would mean that without relaxing his standards Quine can have counterfactuals for free.
In order to argue that this is so, we shall need to see first what counterfactuals are and why they are problematic. Second, we shall examine a widely accepted analysis of counterfactuals. Quine rejects this analysis, but seeing how it works and why Quine rejects it will be a useful preliminary step in providing a new account more satisfactory to Quine. The final portion of this paper will sketch and develop that new account of counterfactuals.
As a first approximation we might say that a counterfactual is any sentence which says what would happen under specified conditions, even though those conditions do not in fact obtain. We might regiment such sentences into this form: rIf it were the case that 4, then it would be the case that ~0 ~ or in Lewis's symbolism: re D-, ~p'. For convenience, call ~ the antecedent and ~0 the consequent. A typical, if somewhat shopworn, example of a counteffactual is: 'ff I had struck that