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Topic: Counterfactual conditionals

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	Counterfactual Theories of Causation
		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 (7207 words)

	COUNTERFACTUAL CONDITIONALS
		It seems most natural to view a counterfactual conditional in the light of an inference to be drawn from the contrary-to-fact thesis represented by its antecedent.
		On the analysis, the conclusion [= the consequent of the counterfactual] appears as a deductive consequence of the assumption [= the antecedent of the counterfactual].
		This truncated-argument analysis of counterfactuals is a contribution, in essence, of a Polish linguistic theorist, Henry Hiz [b.
	horizons-2000.org /2.%20Ideas%20and%20Meaning/Topics/not%20linked/conditional%20counterfactuals.html (594 words)

	20th WCP: If, What-If, and So-What: Mixing Metaphors, Conditionals, and Philosophy
		Conditionals in Philosophy: The semantic analysis of conditionals has a traditional place on the philosophical agenda because of the connections between conditionals and arguments, the focus of logic on argument analysis, and the centrality of logic for philosophy.
		Truth conditional semantics stumble over counterfactuals, possible worlds semantics cannot accommodate counterpossibles, axiomatic and metalinguistic approaches are largely inadequate for the gamut of ordinary language conditionals, and pragmatic theories generally fail for the original job of validating logical inference.
		Thus, the conditional in (8a) presupposes a conversational context hospitable to the antecedent metaphor.
	www.bu.edu /wcp/Papers/Meth/MethCohe.htm (3995 words)

	EVOLUTIONARY ECONOMICS AND THE COUNTERFACTUAL THREAT (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-21)
		Counterfactuals also appear in another place which is germane to this discussion: philosophical discussions of causation have often employed counterfactual conditionals as the key concept.
		The antecedent of the counterfactual conditional must be feasible in a static sense; that is, it must describe a state that is internally consistent.
		Whether or not an counterfactual conditional is accepted as empirical evidence depends not on the statistical significance of parameter estimates but rather on whether an historical, causal explanation is compelling and thus whether the counterfactual is assertable.
	www.cgl.uwaterloo.ca /~racowan/counter.html (9426 words)

	Conditionals, and necessary and sufficient conditions (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-21)
		A is known as the antecedent of the conditional, and B is known as the consequent of the conditional.
		Examples of conditional statements are, "If the crystals turn green, then oxygen is present"; "If John eats another pudding, then he'll be sick"; etc. Conditional statements are important both for the role they play in (everyday and philosophical) reasoning, and in the analyses of other philosophical concepts like essence, cause and disposition.
		As was said earlier, material conditionals merely assert that, as a matter of fact, it is not the case that the antecedent is true and the consequent false.
	www.cogsci.ed.ac.uk /~ddb/teaching/vade-mecum/2-4.htm (774 words)

	[No title]
		A defender of a counterfactual theory of causation will likely think that this temporal asymmetry in causation reflects an asymmetry in counterfactual dependence: while the future depends counterfactually on the past and present, the past is not counterfactually dependent on the present and future.
		But whether e counterfactually depends on c is not at all clear, and that is because it is not at all clear what is going on in a counterfactual situation in which c does not occur.
		Thanks to the stipulation that the counterfactual conditional is to be given a non-backtracking reading, Lewis's analysis cleanly avoids each of these three problems (bracketing, for the moment, the reservations voiced in section 1 about some of the principal attempts to provide the needed truth conditions for non-backtracking counterfactuals).
	www.wam.umd.edu /~mfrisch/Collins-Hall-Paul/Chapter_01/Ch01_Text.doc (18222 words)

	[No title]
		For Ryu and Lee, deontic modalities should occur in defeasible or counterfactual conditionals, not in material conditionals.
		Presumably all such birds of indeterminate subspecies are already believed to fly, concluded through the original conditional when they were first observed to be birds (and the conclusions that those birds fly are each now suspects for revision).
		A subsequent predication that something is a bird (an expansion of the belief set) should be accompanied with an explicit predication that it flies, or that it is not a penguin.
	www.cs.wustl.edu /~loui/revcience.text (2751 words)

	Michael Tooley's Philosophy Home Page
		Secondly, there are approaches that employ subjunctive conditionals, either in an attempt to give a purely counterfactual analysis of causation (David Lewis, 1973 and 1979), or as a supplement to other notions, such as that of agency (Georg von Wright, 1971).
		One way of arriving at a counterfactual account is by analyzing causation in terms of necessary and/or sufficient conditions, but then interpreting the latter, not in terms of nomologically necessary and nomologically sufficient conditions, but in terms of subjunctive conditionals.
		Then it might be the case that the conditional probability of an event of type A given an event of type B was exactly equal to the unconditional probability of an event of type A, but surely this is not necessary.
	spot.colorado.edu /~tooley/CausationSection5.html (13666 words)

	Self-appraisal of professional performance (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-21)
		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.
		Using both methods of interpreting spatiotemporal counterfactuals, and using the previously introduced locality condition, I have argued that the EPR argument is invalid and therefore it does not imply the existence of any "hidden" elements of reality above and beyond what is given in the ordinary quantum-mechanical description.
	users.rowan.edu /~bigaj/research.htm (1013 words)

	[No title] (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-21)
		When a person says of a sentence that it is a natural law, she undertakes commitments with respect to the truth of the sentence under counterfactual conditions, the explanatory role of the sentence, and its relation to empirical evidence.
		Assume that the counterfactual conditional ‘p>q’ is correct in W1, and incorrect in W2, (regardless of what one takes to be the correct account of counterfactual correctness). Because ‘p>q’ is a counterfactual conditional, p is not true in either W1 or W2.
		Initially, Lange proposes that a claim is a natural law in world W if it is preserved under all the counterfactual conditions that are consistent with the natural laws of W. However, Lange finds several problems with this proposal that lead him to suggest a different approach.
	aardvark.ucsd.edu /grad_conference/scharp.doc (5548 words)

	Counterfactual Research News - Bibliography (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-21)
		[Counterfactual reasoning in evaluations of responsibility: The case of tragic coincidences].
		Roese, N. The crossroads of affect and cognition: Counterfactuals as compensatory cognition.
		Roese, N. J., and Olson, J. Counterfactuals, causal attributions, and the hindsight bias: A conceptual integration.
	www.psych.uiuc.edu /~roese/cf/cfbib.htm (5961 words)

	Transitions, Miracles, and True Components: three qualms with Lewis’ counterfactual semantic
		Counterfactuals are generally taken to be special conditional statements expressed in the subjunctive mood, often signifying some type of relevant connection between their antecedents and consequents.
		Whereas a material conditional is false only when its antecedent is true and consequent false, a counterfactual evidently has no systematic connection between the mere truth value of its components and the truth of the conditional overall.
		We ordinarily resolve the vagueness of counterfactuals in such a way that counterfactual dependence is asymmetric (except perhaps in cases of time travel or the like).
	www.colorado.edu /StudentGroups/PhilosophyClub/Botham.htm (3493 words)

	Counterfactual Conditionals
		Counterfactual conditionals ("counterfactuals," for short) are statements about situations which we know did not occur -- as opposed to indicative conditionals, where the antecedent is, or at least might be, true.
		But even if we disagree over which of two opposed counterfactuals is true -- that is, about which consequent would have been true, if the counterfactual antecedent were true -- even then we all agree that not both of the (opposed) consequents would have been true.
		If adding the counterfactual antecedent to the conversational background were all there is to judging counterfactuals, we would have a nice simple pragmatic theory.
	www.ux1.eiu.edu /~cfbxb/class/1900/prag/counter.htm (1364 words)

	T4.3 p5 Controversial Symbolizatons (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-21)
		This is important because there are many cases of English counterfactual conditionals which are not material conditionals.
		The idea of these "subjunctive mood" conditionals is a concern with the hypothetical, with what might have been the case, rather than with what is in fact the case.
		But conditionals of English in the indicative mood (typically without the "were" and "would") may be material conditionals.
	www.oakland.edu /phil/cafe/Tch4_3Controv5.htm (192 words)

	Mind: Can Edgington Gibbard counterfactuals? - response to Dorothy Edgington, Mind, vol. 104, p. 235, 1995
		She argues that the Gibbard phenomenon, which provides a hard to resist case for denying truth values to many indicative conditionals, can be extended to counterfactuals.
		It cannot be that the counterfactuals have no objective truth value just because the world rules out Jones' getting the disease, for there are plenty of counterfactuals with impossible antecedents ("if we were to flap our arms and fly to the top of that building, we could see the sun set").
		The important point is not that the standard analyses of counterfactuals block conditional excluded middle, but that the reasoning that makes it plausible for indicatives fails for counterfactuals.
	www.findarticles.com /p/articles/mi_m2346/is_n421_v106/ai_19793603 (1229 words)

	Counterfactual Fallacies
		Counterfactual conditionals are those in which the antecedent is false, and which assert that one event would be, or would have been the case if another event were, or would have been the case.
		where A, the counterfactual antecedent, describes an event that is contrary to what is actually true, and C, the counterfactual consequent describes a result expected to hold in an alternative world where the antecedent is true.
		A material conditional will be true whenever the antecedent is false, but this cannot be the case for counterfactual conditionals since their antecedents are always false, and so every counterfactual conditional would be true.
	www.csus.edu /indiv/m/merlinos/counterfactuals.html (1945 words)

	Counterfactual Conditionals (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-21)
		Counterfactual conditionals are "if, then" statements (conditionals) where the "if" part is false.
		Since I didn't get a lot of sleep last night and was very tired this morning, I would not have woken up without my alarm ringing, and thus would not have made it to class on time.
		In fact, I'm pretty sure that (unless it was my birthday or something) if she ever had plans of baking me a cake today, my insulting her would change that.
	www.unc.edu /~theis/Exp&R/counterfactual.html (271 words)

	The Cognitive Science Group - Deductive Reasoning (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-21)
		Counterfactual conditionals require a richer representation than factual conditionals and as a result they can take longer to process and lead to more errors.
		Counterfactual and factual conditionals can be expressed in different ways, for example, using 'if' 'only if' or 'unless'.
		People mentally represent equivalent conditionals in different ways depending on the sort of connective used, and their mental representation of the assertions affects the inferences they make from them.
	www.tcd.ie /Psychology/Cognitive_Science/Deductive_Reasoning.html (368 words)

	Mind and Anomalous Monism [Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy]
		The identity conditions of events can furthermore, he thinks, be established purely extensionally: event A and event B are identical if and only if they have all of the same causes and all of the same effects.
		It is important to recognize, however, that intensionality is for Davidson merely a sufficient condition for mentality; he does not seem to regard it as being even close to necessary.
		In order to understand why the advocate of AM will be committed to the irreducibility of the mental, then, one need only ask what he thinks it is about instances of mental causation that makes them insusceptible to the sort of explanation that can be provided by appeal to so-called “strict” natural laws.
	www.iep.utm.edu /m/anom-mon.htm (5957 words)

	Counterfactuals and Updates as Inverse Modalities - Ryan, Schobbens (ResearchIndex) (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-21)
		We point out a simple but hitherto ignored link between the theory of updates and counterfactuals and classical modal logic: update is a classical existential modality, counterfactual is a classical universal modality, and the accessibility relations corresponding to these modalities are inverses.
		The Ramsey Rule (often thought esoteric) is simply an axiomatisation of this inverse relationship.
		We use this fact to translate between postulates for updates and postulates for counterfactuals....
	citeseer.ist.psu.edu /348329.html (613 words)

	T2.3 tFunc p 3
		To do this, again think about constructing a truth table – we need to see that this construction attempt will fail.
		(We will see that there is no truth table possible for conditionals involving "were" and "would" as in 3.
		(Thus, were-would conditionals are different from more ordinary conditionals we treated in the last tutorial and symbolized with a horseshoe.
	www.oakland.edu /phil/cafe/Tch2_3tFunc3.htm (264 words)

	Causation and Conditionals #2 (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-21)
		Dispute between EJ Lowe and Ramachandran on whether we are compelled to treat counterfactuals as (contextually restricted) strict conditionals.
		Some arguments against the simple case for thinking of indicative and subjunctive conditionals as semantically distinct.
		P Santos, 'Two Bad Arguments for the Apartheid View of Conditionals', at the following url: http://fildalinguagem.no.sapo.pt/santos.pdf (I can't vouch for the quality of this as I have not read it; but it looks interesting.)
	www.sussex.ac.uk /Users/muralir/malogic/malogic_2.html (121 words)

	Prof. Ruth Byrne -Publications
		Byrne, R.M.J. and Egan, S.M. Counterfactual and Prefactual Conditionals.
		Byrne, R.M.J. and Walsh, C.R. Contradictions and counterfactuals: Generating belief revisions in conditional inference.
		Quelhas, C. and Byrne, R.M.J. Latencies to understand and reasoning from counterfactual conditionals.
	www.tcd.ie /Psychology/Ruth_Byrne/publications.html (351 words)

	Sample Multiple Choice Exam Questions (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-21)
		Karl Lambert and Gordon Brittan, "Laws and Conditional Statements"
		(c) only statements which are universal in form and which support counterfactuals
		According to Lambert and Britten, counterfactual conditionals are
	www.calpoly.edu /~fotoole/321/lambs.htm (153 words)

	Lambert & Britten Exam (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-21)
		According to Lambert and Britten, universal statements which support counterfactual conditionals differ from accidental generalizations in that they are:
		According to Lambert and Britten, laws "support" counterfactual conditionals in the sense that:
		According to Lambert and Britten, the statement "All unicorns are fleet of foot.":
	www.calpoly.edu /~fotoole/321.1/lambm.html (236 words)

	Publications
		"Counterfactual Conditionals", forthcoming in the online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
		"Counterfactual Theories of Causation" for the online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
		"Difference-Making in Context", forthcoming in Counterfactuals and Causation, eds.
	www.phil.mq.edu.au /staff/pmenzies/Publications.html (667 words)

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