| Summary: | To an unusual extent, philosophers agree that counterfactuals have truth conditions involving the most similar possible worlds where their antecedents are true, in the style of the celebrated and path‐breaking Stalnaker/Lewis accounts. Roughly, these accounts say that the counterfactual if A were the case, C would be the case is true if and only if at the most similar A‐worlds, C is true. I will argue that there are general structural problems with the appeals to both "the most" and "similar". I will challenge any fixation on 'the most __ worlds', however we fill in the blank with a non‐trivial ordering of worlds: in ignoring worlds that are later in the ordering, it adjudicates various implausibly specific counterfactuals to be true. I will then raise foundational problems for appealing to 'similarity'—from consequents that are chancy, disjunctive antecedents, and unspecific antecedents more generally. I will also raise further problems for a number of specific proposals for understanding 'similarity'. A recurring theme will be the tension that may arise between probability and similarity considerations. I will end by arguing for a paradigm shift, replacing 'the most similar worlds' approach with one based on conditional chances.
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