Status Updates From Counterfactuals

Now he's appealing to...his opinions...when is it allowed to do that and when is it not...

Like: "It is more possible for a dog to talk than for a stone to talk, since some worlds with talking dogs are more like our world than is any world with talking stones" Both need to have some distinctions though, so it actually becomes a numerical competition between a stone-difference and some other difference, with nothing to stop infinite divisibility. Does this degrees of similarity thing really work?

Re: similarity measures...While it is true that to numeralize similarity relations between worlds is misleading because it covers over the different aspects of similarity, same goes for any idea of "degrees", which is just a degenerate number, and also for the whole Ptolemaic system introduced herein. Wouldn't it be much better to have multiple types of similarity in a hierarchical order: state, law, world etc.

Eh, really not sure about this counterpart thing...If the essence of a thing is what it does not lack in any of its counterparts, then in virtue of what doesn't it lack them. This seems even more of a shambles than Kripke's theory, whose equivalent Lewis correctly criticizes for unexplained differences in the subject, while he could be criticized for unexplained similarity

rigid designator related stuff starts here

Transitivity doesn't hold in modal logic, of course! This book is brutal but very fascinating