Counterfactuals and Chancy Relativism

ABSTRACT Alan Hájek (2024) argues for counterfactual skepticism, the view that many (or “most”) counterfactuals are false. In this paper, I consider what Hájek's semantic position looks like when we pair it with a MacFarlane (2008, 2014)‐style relativist postsemantics. On this view, a counterfactual utterance may start out false, but later come to be assessed as true—even if the counterfactual's antecedent and consequent express eternalist propositions. The package view, which I call chancy relativism , preserves Hájek's metaphysical commitments but pairs smoothly with speakers' intuitions about retrospective assessments.