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Statistical Mechanics and the Asymmetry of Counterfactual Dependence

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2022

Adam Elga
Adam Elga*
Affiliation:
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
*
†Send requests for reprints to the author, Department of Linguistics and Philosophy, MIT, 77 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, MA 02139; email: adam@mit.edu.
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Abstract

In “Counterfactual Dependence and Time's Arrow”, David Lewis defends an analysis of counterfactuals intended to yield the asymmetry of counterfactual dependence: that later affairs depend counterfactually on earlier ones, and not the other way around. I argue that careful attention to the dynamical properties of thermodynamically irreversible processes shows that in many ordinary cases, Lewis's analysis fails to yield this asymmetry. Furthermore, the analysis fails in an instructive way: it teaches us something about the connection between the asymmetry of overdetermination and the asymmetry of entropy.

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Footnotes

‡

Thanks to Ned Hall, Robert Stalnaker, Sarah McGrath, and Anthony Newman, to conference audiences at Princeton University, the University of Western Ontario, and the 2000 meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association, to attendees of the M.A.T.T.I. group at MIT, and to David Albert (for a great seminar on the direction of time). Thanks to Norm Margolus, both for helpful discussion and for kind assistance on using the CAM8 computing architecture. Thanks also to the Josephine de Kármán Fellowship Trust for research support.

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