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Topic: Counterfactuals

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	Counterfactual Theories of Causation (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
		The basic idea of counterfactual theories of causation is that the meaning of a singular causal claim of the form "Event c caused event e" can be explained in terms of counterfactual conditionals of the form "If c had not occurred, e would not have occurred".
		The chief obstacle in empiricists' minds to explaining causation in terms of counterfactuals was the obscurity of counterfactuals themselves, owing chiefly to their reference to unactualised possibilities.
		Counterfactual dependence is not transitive, so it can happen that three actual events c, d and e are such that d would not have occurred without c, and e would not have occurrred without d, but e would still have occurred without c.
	plato.stanford.edu /entries/causation-counterfactual (7217 words)

	Counterfactual conditional - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
		A counterfactual conditional, or subjunctive conditional, is a conditional (or "if-then") statement indicating what would be the case if its antecedent were true.
		The second is a counterfactual conditional that is intuitively false (or at least not obviously true).
		Counterfactual conditionals may also be evaluated using the so-called Ramsey test: A > B holds if and only if the addition of A to the current body of knowledge has B as a consequence.
	en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Counterfactual (667 words)

	Amazon.com: Counterfactuals: Books: David K. Lewis (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-30)
		"Counterfactuals" is that rarest of things: a truly original philosophical work that actually succeeds in its stated aim.
		I attempt to pass information to you in uttering it (maybe I'm just trying to convince you, or impress you...but that's another story with a different, more game-theoretic, analysis); you are given the option of updating your judged probability of various epistemic scenarios, conditioned on your experience, in light of what you've heard.
		Notice that the "truth" of the counterfactual isn't part of what it means under this analysis; only what information it might impart.
	www.amazon.com /Counterfactuals-David-K-Lewis/dp/0631224254 (1251 words)

	Reason Explanations, and Counterfactuals
		In evaluating conditionals concerning what a person would have done in counterfactual circumstances, we suppose the counterfactual antecedent to be true, just as in what I loosely term the standard "Ramsey" procedure; but then we follow a different path--a simulative path--in evaluating the consequent.
		In general, when I follow the simulative path, I take the counterfactual antecedent as an input to reasoning that leads to a simulation of what is predicted: a pretend decision if the counterfactual concerns what I would decide to do, a pretend belief if the counterfactual concerns what I would believe, and so forth.
		The counterfactual premise, "The banana is a telephone," becomes a premise of practical reasoning as well as of theoretical reasoning.
	www.umsl.edu /~philo/Faculty/Gordon/MindSeminar99/papers/Gordon/counterf.html (3982 words)

	Hector Parr's Essays: Conditionals and Counterfactuals
		Each of these is an example of a counterfactual, a conditional statement with a false antecedent, an antecedent which you know must be false, for were it not so you would not exist and could have no thoughts.
		The generally accepted meaning of counterfactual statements is in terms of "possible worlds", as laid out carefully by David Lewis in his book "Counterfactuals" (see [3]).
		Counterfactuals, like other conditionals, must spring from an implication whose reason we can understand, and not from imagining another world.
	www.hectorparr.freeuk.com /hcp/if.htm (4266 words)

	Mixing Memory: If We Had a Cognitive Account of Counterfactuals, This Would Be It
		Counterfactuals figure in guilt and regret, blame-attribution, ordinary causal reasoning, scientific reasoning (including in the structure of scientific experiments and hypothesis testing in general) and all sorts of other things.
		In other words, counterfactual scenarios are likely to differ from their corresponding factual scenarios on dimensions that are relevant in our representations of the factual scenarios.
		All they have to do is re-align the now fully-structured counterfactual domain with the factual one, and use their background knowledge to determine whether the mutations they've made make sense.
	mixingmemory.blogspot.com /2004/10/if-we-had-cognitive-account-of.html (818 words)

	Gift Unique: Books: Counterfactuals (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-30)
		Counterfactuals is David Lewis's forceful presentation of and sustained argument for a particular view about propositions which express contrary-to-fact conditionals, including his famous defense of realism about possible worlds.
		"Counterfactuals" is not for the kiddies, or even the "interested general reader", if such a person exists.
		"Counterfactuals" is that rarest of things: a truly original philosophical work that actually succeeds in its stated aim.
	www.gift-unique.com /shop.php?mode=Books&item=0631224254 (432 words)

	Towards a Property Theoretic Account of Counterfactuals
		According to possible worlds accounts, a counterfactual conditional of the form “If it were the case that Q, then it would be the case that P” is true if its consequent is true at the closest world or worlds where its antecedent is true.
		Standard possible worlds semantics for counterfactuals takes the closest possible world at which a counterfactual's antecedent is true to share the history of the world of evaluation up to the occurrence of the antecedent, at which time a small miracle is allowed to occur.
		The consequent of a counterfactual refers to a condition that is entailed by.
	facweb.bcc.ctc.edu /wpayne/towards_a_property_theoretic_acc1.htm (3182 words)

	BioMed Central \| Full text \| Causal inference based on counterfactuals
		Counterfactuals are the basis of causal inference in medicine and epidemiology.
		Counterfactual reflections seem to play a vital role in creativity when human beings deal with "what would have happened if" questions [13].
		Counterfactual causality was the central idea that stimulated invention of randomised experiments by Ronald A. Fisher and statistical inference on them by Fisher around 1920 and, later, by Jerzey Neyman and Egon Pearson in a somewhat different way [3,17].
	www.biomedcentral.com /1471-2288/5/28 (7973 words)

	supporting counterfactuals
		This counterfactual is adequately supported because the disposition to expand when heated is essential to the kind copper.
		Counterfactuals (1973), Lewis argues against the view that counterfactuals are strict, or necessary, conditionals.
		I have presented the property theoretic account of counterfactuals in terms of counterfactuals whose antecedents are consistent with the laws that hold (those that analyze the dispositions that in fact are had by things).
	www.bcc.ctc.edu /Artshum/materials/phil/Payne/spring03/160INPCpaperSp03.htm (3267 words)

	Chance and Counterfactuals (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-30)
		It thus seems that we should conclude that the ordinary counterfactual is false.
		Worlds in which a bizarre chance event unfolds are quasi-miraculous worlds and as such are, ceteris paribus, further from the actual world than worlds in which such events do not occur.
		Others will have a principled objection to any semantics that appears to tie the truth value of counterfactuals to the contingent make-up of human psychology – which will inevitably be the basis of any articulate distinction between remarkableness and unremarkableness that can do the job here.
	www.sims.berkeley.edu /~kahern/hawthorne/chanceAndCounterfactuals.htm (2719 words)

	Stathis Psillos - A Glimpse of the Secret Connexion: Harmonising Mechanisms with Counterfactuals (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-30)
		If causation amounts to counterfactual dependence among events, then the truth of the claim that c causes e will depend on the absence of causal overdeterminers, since if the effect e is causally overdetermined, it won't be counterfactually dependent on any of its causes.
		Counterfactuals have been reprimanded on the ground that they are context-dependent: whether they are true or false will depend on what factors are held fixed.
		In his (2003b, 171) he stresses that the appropriate counterfactuals for elucidating causal claims are not just any counterfactuals but rather counterfactuals of a very special sort: those that have to do with the outcomes of hypothetical interventions.
	evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com /psillos.htm (11349 words)

	PhilSci Archive - Discussion: Time-Symmetric Quantum Counterfactuals (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-30)
		There is a trend to consider counterfactuals as invariably
		aspects, thus contesting the claim that counterfactuals have to be
		Kastner, Ruth (2002) The Nature of the Controversy Over Time-Symmetric Quantum Counterfactuals.
	philsci-archive.pitt.edu /archive/00001108 (88 words)

	Mental undoing of actions and inactions in the absence of counterfactuals.
		Mental undoing of actions and inactions in the absence of counterfactuals.
		In the present Experiments 1 and 2, it was found that when both counterfactuals were not known, people still judged that actions would be regretted more than inactions not only in the short term but also in the long term.
		Counterfactuals cannot count: a rejoinder to David Chalmers.
	www.accelerated-learning-online.com /research/mental-undoing-actions-inactions-absence-counterfactuals.asp (555 words)

	Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals
		As Ferguson explains in an Introduction that outlines the history and theory of counterfactual writing, the consideration of the "what-ifs" is actually required by the pure Rankean principle of sticking to the documents.
		Among the other counterfactuals that are cast into doubt in this book are the revisionist hypotheses that the West started the Cold War and that the US dropped the two atomic bombs on Japan in 1945 primarily to intimidate the Russians.
		Counterfactuals need not be concerned simply with the decisions reached by committees: they can also usefully address how important were the accidents that substituted one leader for another.
	pages.prodigy.net /aesir/vihi.htm (3325 words)

	Metapsychology Online Reviews - Causation and Counterfactuals
		If c occurred at t, then in considering a possible world in which c does not occur, we are to consider a world in which the laws of the actual world are violated shortly before t in a localized way that is just sufficient enough to permit c's not occurring.
		Friends of the counterfactual view are primarily concerned with developing the counterfactual view so that it can handle various objections.
		Sometimes, as with the papers by Stephen Yablo and Peter Menzies, the counterfactual view is taken in directions quite different from the one Lewis took it in.
	www.mentalhelp.net /books/books.php?type=de&id=2644 (1430 words)

	Lewis's Analysis of Counterfactuals - PL0213 ConditionalWiki (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-30)
		This counterfactual is intuitively true, but on the Lewis analysis it looks as though it is going to come out false.
		It seems as though a world at which the consequent is false (because the signal died on the wire or some malfunction caused the missile to fail to deploy) is closer than any world in which the nuclear war takes place.
		It is important to note that counterfactual dependence of the past on the present, or backtracking, presents a special problem for Lewis.
	www.brown.edu /Courses/PL0213/wiki/index.php/Lewis's_Analysis_of_Counterfactuals (1729 words)

	wo's weblog: Modal knowledge, counterfactuals and counterpossibles (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-30)
		I share their suspicion, partly for the reasons Carrie mentions: the mere fact that statements about necessity and possibility are equivalent to counterfactuals doesn't tell us that the route to knowing the former proceeds via the latter.
		Many counterfactuals with impossible antecedent really express falsehoods; but what is expressed isn't what is literally said.
		I'm not sure Williamson would say that there is a 'special cognitive faculty' for counterfactuals; he talks about our knowledge of them being obtainable through 'offline' application of the same processes that we use all over the place.
	www.umsu.de /wo/archive/2007/03/05/Modal_knowledge__counterfactuals_and_counterpossibles (1473 words)

	Middle Knowledge, Truthâ“Makers, and the "Grounding Objection"
		Moreover, limiting the truth of such counterfactuals to a moment logically posterior to God's decree appears to make God the author of sin and to obliterate human freedom, since in that case it is God who decrees which counterfactuals about creaturely free acts are true, including counterfactuals concerning sinful human decisions.
		Similarly, when we turn from futureâ“tense propositions to counterfactual propositions and consider Freddoso's proposed truthâ“makers for counterfactuals of creaturely freedom, we see that O'Connor's denial that "there is something 'there "objectively" to be known'"{33} is rooted in the same crude understanding of truthâ“makers already exposed.
		It is the glass's fragility which is the truthâ“maker of the counterfactual at issue, and the causal basis of the disposition is at most responsible, not for the glass's fragility, but for the manifestation of that fragility, that is to say, for the actual shattering of the glass.
	www.leaderu.com /offices/billcraig/docs/grounding.html (6825 words)

	Self-appraisal of professional performance
		The common intuition underlying both versions of counterfactuals is that in order to evaluate a particular counterfactual, one has to consider a possible world which "diverges" from the actual one no earlier than at the moment of realization of the antecedent A, and then evolves according to the usual laws of nature.
		The difference between the two versions of counterfactuals stems from the fact that in relativity the past of an event can be defined twofold: as its past light cone, and as the entire region of space-time except its future light cone.
		Ultimately I hope to use the improved notion of counterfactual causality once again in the context of quantum mechanics, and to address the notorious question whether there is a causal connection between distant parts of entangled quantum systems.
	users.rowan.edu /~bigaj/research.htm (1013 words)

	Chance and Counterfactuals
		Others will have a principled objection to any semantics that appears to tie the truth value of counterfactuals to the contingent make-up of human psychology – which will inevitably be the basis of any articulate distinction between remarkableness and unremarkableness that can do the job here.
		It is also to give up on all neo-verficationist analyses of counterfactual discourse, since the closeness relation between worlds and the counterfactual operator on propositions form a family into which there is no entering reductive wedge.
		Consider a happy case in which I make a counterfactual judgment of this sort and the closest world where the antecedent is true is one where the plate I am speaking of falls to the floor.
	www.emergentdatasystems.com /hawthorne/chanceCounterfactuals.htm (2981 words)

	[No title]
		Foot note 3_1 the ontology necessary for Lewis' theory is qualitatively unparsimonious: It «is committed to the unicorns, to the gods, to the ghosts and to the qualia which occur in other possible worlds.» That is to say, it is committed to that which in the actual world would be regarded as impossible.
		In this paper, we present an alternative truth-functional semantics for counterfactuals which is (a) qualitatively parsimonious in its ontology, (b) requires neither multiple quantification nor a selection function, and (c) gets the truth values of (1)-(4) right.
		First, let us classify counterfactuals into three groups: indicative counterfactuals such as (1), subjunctive conditionals such as (2) and (3), and what we shall call -- extending a term from metaphysics -- counteressentials, such as (4).
	www.sorites.org /Issue_05/item4.htm (938 words)

	Counterfactual conditional - Art History Online Reference and Guide
		A counterfactual conditional (sometimes called a subjunctive conditional) is a logical conditional statement whose antecedent is (ordinarily) taken to be contrary to fact by those who utter it.
		Counterfactual conditionals cannot be modeled using the material conditional, because any material conditional with a false antecedent is automatically true.
		Because of this problem (and others like it), philosophers such as David Lewis and Robert Stalnaker have tried to devise ways of formally modelling counterfactuals using the possible world semantics of modal logic.
	www.arthistoryclub.com /art_history/Counterfactuals (376 words)

	LENIN'S TOMB: Zizek on counterfactuals
		Zizek also notes how conservative historians justify their parlour games by negative reference to "historically determinist" caricature of Marxism, and asks "what should the Marxist's answer be?" His initial strategy is to debunk the notion that Marxists are "dumb determinists who can't entertain alternative scenarios".
		This suggests that the Leninist "counterfactual" is not a counterfactual in the strict sense of the term.
		The notion of a counterfactual only makes sense within the analytic conception of "possible worlds" (cf Kripke), where all the possible worlds are "realistic", but only one of them happens to be actual.
	leninology.blogspot.com /2005/08/zizek-on-counterfactuals.html (614 words)

	[cs/0311028] Using Counterfactuals in Knowledge-Based Programming
		The use of counterfactuals is illustrated by designing a protocol in which an agent stops sending messages once it knows that it is safe to do so.
		Such behavior is difficult to capture in the original framework because it involves reasoning about counterfactual executions, including ones that are not consistent with the protocol.
		Attempts to formalize these notions without counterfactuals are shown to lead to rather counterintuitive behavior.
	arxiv.org /abs/cs.DC/0311028 (122 words)

	let's be sensible: Counterfactuals
		Here's an interesting counterfactual piece by Peter Preston (via Paulie), about the political consequences for Tony Blair if he hadn't supported the Iraq war.
		It's necessarily speculative, because counterfactual history always is, but it's plausible - which, with counterfactual history, is the most you can ask for, and not always what you get.
		None of this is to say for a moment that decisions don't have consequences, or that decision-makers don't bear the moral responsibility for the results of the decisions they make.
	letsbesensible.blogspot.com /2007/05/counterfactuals.html (1148 words)

	Hector Parr's Essays: Conditionals and Counterfactuals
		Such conditionals are called "Counterfactuals", or "Subjunctive Conditionals", and I shall attempt to show that in some circumstances they are indeed meaningless.
		Each of these is an example of a counterfactual, a conditional statement with a false antecedent, an antecedent which you know must be false, for were it not so you would not exist and could have no thoughts.
		The generally accepted meaning of counterfactual statements is in terms of "possible worlds", as laid out carefully by David Lewis in his book "Counterfactuals" (see [3]).
	www.c-parr.freeserve.co.uk /hcp/if.htm (4266 words)

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