This volume explores the conceptual terrain defined by the Greek word eikos: the probable, likely, or reasonable. A term of art in Greek rhetoric, a defining feature of literary fiction, a seminal mode of historical, scientific, and philosophical inquiry, eikos was a way of thin…
Argues that the concepts of necessity and possibility originate in a common type of thought experiment, counterfactual reasoning, that allows us to investigate explanatory connections and is colsely related to the controlled experiments of empirical science.
This is the first book length defence of a counterfactual theory of causation. The analysis defended is new. It expresses the idea that, independent of its competitors, a cause raises the chance of an effect over its mean background chance by a complete causal chain. The analysi…