One philosopher who defied convention, David Lewis, called in his 1973 book Counterfactuals for abandoning the regularity account altogether and for interpreting “A has caused B” as “B would not have occurred if not for A.” Lewis asked, “Why not take counterfactuals at face value: as statements about possible alternatives to the actual situation?” Like Hume, Lewis was evidently impressed by the fact that humans make counterfactual judgments without much ado, swiftly, comfortably, and consistently. We can assign them truth values and probabilities with no less confidence than we do for factual
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