In this sort of case the motivation for the philosophical realism is that there is a real grammatical construction that's actually used in the world, and we're wondering what it's actual truth-conditions are. Maybe the best model for the semantics of this construction will involve graphical models a la Pearl. Or maybe the best semantics will require that we postulate things called possible worlds that have certain ordering properties. In either case, there will then still be a question whether the sentences ever come out true on the best semantics, or whether we're implicitly committed to certain falsehoods every time we utter the sentence. But it's far from obvious that the proper account of counterfactuals in ordinary language is in terms of some sort of computational procedure.
And actually, indicative conditionals seem to be even more problematic than counterfactuals. There's lots of explaining you need to do to just assimilate them to the material conditional, and if you try to connect them to conditional probabilities then you have to say what truth-values between 0 and 1 mean, and get around all the triviality proofs.
Conditionals in general are quite hard to deal with. But this doesn't mean you can just get away with dismissing them and say that they're never true, because of some naive commitment to everything mentioned in your semantics having to be observable in some nice direct way. If they're not true, then you have to do lots of work to say just what it is that we're doing when we go around uttering them.
In this sort of case the motivation for the philosophical realism is that there is a real grammatical construction that's actually used in the world, and we're wondering what it's actual truth-conditions are. Maybe the best model for the semantics of this construction will involve graphical models a la Pearl. Or maybe the best semantics will require that we postulate things called possible worlds that have certain ordering properties. In either case, there will then still be a question whether the sentences ever come out true on the best semantics, or whether we're implicitly committed to certain falsehoods every time we utter the sentence. But it's far from obvious that the proper account of counterfactuals in ordinary language is in terms of some sort of computational procedure.
And actually, indicative conditionals seem to be even more problematic than counterfactuals. There's lots of explaining you need to do to just assimilate them to the material conditional, and if you try to connect them to conditional probabilities then you have to say what truth-values between 0 and 1 mean, and get around all the triviality proofs.
Conditionals in general are quite hard to deal with. But this doesn't mean you can just get away with dismissing them and say that they're never true, because of some naive commitment to everything mentioned in your semantics having to be observable in some nice direct way. If they're not true, then you have to do lots of work to say just what it is that we're doing when we go around uttering them.