The Problem Of Counterfactual Conditionals Of Goodman

Nelson Goodman is an American philosopher and logician. He is the representative of New Pragmatism and Logical Pragmatism. Goodman issued his paper" The Problem of Counterfactual Conditionals" in Science in 1964. The idea of the counterfactual conditionals and the proposal of solving the dilemma of such sentences were suggested in the paper, which shocked both the society of the philosophy of Science and the society of philosophy of Logic.Goodman's idea is based on his investigation into material entailment in the field of traditional truth and classic logic (we will adopt Classic Theory for short in the following passage). Classic Theory makes the judgment about the truth of the conditional sentence (including counterfactual conditional sentence) according to the truth relation hold between the antecedent and the consequent of the sentence. According to Classic Theory, a conditional sentence is true only if its antecedent is false. Therefore, a counterfactual conditional sentence is true because its antecedent is false. Goodman gave a lot of examples to suggest that Classic Theory is inconsistent at this point, further more, he proposed the completely new perspective of looking into the idea of truth which is quite different from the previous researches. With the aim of solving the problem, Goodman suggested a lot of theoretical suppositions such as relevance,lawlike, and projection. But his suppositions were in trouble with either the circular argument or the infinite validation, and none of them led to a proper solution.This paper probes into the problems raised by Goodman and learns the suggested solutions given by him from the perspective of Realism, Counter Realism, and New Pragmatism. By contrasting the cognitive difference in learning the origins of the problem concerning counter factual conditionals, the paper proposes the thinking about the solution to the problems of counter factual conditionals.