Re: The issue of the status of counterfactuals

I'm sorry, I don't think you understood the argument I was making. I shall try to explain it again as clearly as I can. The subjunctive is not obviously "ruled out" in a deterministic universe. "Had X not happened, Y would not have happened" does not seem logically inconsistent with "In the circumstances, X was bound to happen". Furthermore, there are difficulties with your position that I tried to draw attention to with my example of the avalanche. For, whether you believe in free will for humans or not, there are large parts of the universe that are deterministic. Or do you not agree that the weather is a deterministic system? I'm assuming (mistakenly?) that you wouldn't want to ascribe free will to inanimate objects like clouds or snow. Now the point is that if determinism rules out counterfactual assertions, then it would rule out such statements as "Had it not snowed yesterday evening, there would not have been an avalanche". And yet I presume you would agree that such statements are perfectly meaningful. Your position has a further implication which you might want to consider. A law of nature differs from a generalisation of fact precisely in entailing counterfactuals. "Everyone who was at the meeting voted in favour of the motion" does not entail "Had I been at the meeting, I would have voted in favour of the motion". But "energy is conserved in every interaction" does entail "if this interaction were to occur, then energy would be conserved", because in the latter case the proposition, being a law, ranges over hypothetical as well as actual instances. Thus, if you rule out counterfactuals in purely mechanistic systems, the implication is that, strictly speaking, there are no laws at all, just generalisations of fact; and although this philosophical position has been maintained (such as by Wittgenstein in the Tractatus), it might seem too heavy a price to pay in order to maintain a mere dogma founded on anti-mechanistic bias.