David Lewis (1973) analyzes the truth conditions and logic of counterfactuals
Counterfactual conditional
A counterfactual conditional abbreviated CF, is a subjunctive conditional containing an if-clause which is contrary to fact. The term counterfactual was coined by Nelson Goodman in 1947, extending Roderick Chisholm's (1946) notion of a "contrary-to-fact conditional".
What is a counterfactual?
A counterfactual is an expression of what has not actually happened but could happen. It is something contrary to fact. A counterfactual is an expression of a condition that would be true if a previous condition had been different.
How can counterfactual analysis be used to evaluate historical events?
Here, counterfactual analysis can be used to evaluate a historical event’s causal significance 1. By exploring how historical events may have unfolded under small changes in circumstances, historians can assess the importance of factors that may have caused the event. Counterfactual analysis is even useful in macroeconomics.
Do counterfactuals have false antecedents and consequents?
Many counterfactuals have false antecedents and consequents, but some are true and others false. (17a) is false—given Joplin’s critiques of consumerism—and (17b) is true. a. If Janis Joplin were alive today, she would drive a Mercedes-Benz.
What is the similarity analysis of counterfactuals?
Recall the rough idea of the similarity analysis sketched in §2.1: worlds can be ordered by their similarity to the actual world, and counterfactuals say that the most similar—or least different—worlds where the antecedent is true are worlds where the consequent is also true.
What is a counterfactual example?
A counterfactual explanation describes a causal situation in the form: “If X had not occurred, Y would not have occurred”. For example: “If I hadn't taken a sip of this hot coffee, I wouldn't have burned my tongue”. Event Y is that I burned my tongue; cause X is that I had a hot coffee.
What is a counterfactual sentence?
A counterfactual is defined as a statement that is not true. In the sentence "If dogs had no ears, they could not hear" the statement "if dogs had no ears" is an example of a counterfactual because dogs DO have ears..
What does counterfactual argument mean?
Counterfactual reasoning means thinking about alternative possibilities for past or future events: what might happen/ have happened if…? In other words, you imagine the consequences of something that is contrary to what actually happened or will have happened ("counter to the facts").
What does counterfactual mean in research?
In the counterfactual analysis, the outcomes of the intervention are compared with the outcomes that would have been achieved if the intervention had not been implemented.
What is another word for counterfactual?
In this page you can discover 14 synonyms, antonyms, idiomatic expressions, and related words for counterfactual, like: hypothetical, wrong, contrary to fact, frequentist, a posteriori, true, counterfactuals, causality, false, specious and spurious.
How do you make a counterfactual?
One common approach to constructing a counterfactual is to simply compare outcomes for the same entity (village, individual, forest, farm, firm, etc.) before and after it has received the conservation intervention. In this case, the pre-intervention outcome is used as the counterfactual outcome.
What is a counterfactual and why is it important?
Counterfactuals serve a preparative function, and help people avoid past blunders. Counterfactual thinking also serves the affective function to make a person feel better. By comparing one's present outcome to a less desirable outcome, the person may feel better about the current situation (1995).
What is a counterfactual question?
Why Ask Counterfactual Questions? A counterfactual is a proposition stating what would have occurred had some- thing not been the case: what would have happened and what would the con- sequences have been if someone else had secured power or another event had not occurred?
What type of reasoning is reasoning by counterfactuals?
Counterfactual reasoning is a hallmark of human thought, enabling the capacity to shift from perceiving the immediate environment to an alternative, imagined perspective.
What is the problem with counterfactuals?
The problem of counterfactuals Since counterfactual conditionals are those whose antecedents are false, this analysis would wrongly predict that all counterfactuals are vacuously true.
How do you prove a counterfactual?
Counterfactual: A counterfactual assertion is a conditional whose antecedent is false and whose consequent describes how the world would have been if the antecedent had obtained. The counterfactual takes the form of a subjunctive conditional: If P had obtained, then Q would have obtained .
What is counterfactual method?
In its simplest form, counterfactual impact evaluation (CIE) is a method of comparison which involves comparing the outcomes of interest of those having benefitted from a policy or programme (the “treated group”) with those of a group similar in all respects to the treatment group (the “comparison/control group”), the ...
What is a counterfactual question?
Why Ask Counterfactual Questions? A counterfactual is a proposition stating what would have occurred had some- thing not been the case: what would have happened and what would the con- sequences have been if someone else had secured power or another event had not occurred?
What is a counterfactual quizlet?
counterfactual thinking. thoughts about what might have been 'if only' with which we undo outcomes in our mind.
What is counterfactual in causal inference?
In the counterfactual model, a causal factor is a necessary factor without which the outcome (e.g. treatment success) would not have occurred. As the condition is not required to be sufficient for the outcome, multiple causal factors are allowed.
What is counterfactual outcome?
The outcome that an individual would have experienced if he had received a particular treatment or exposure value.
What is the function of counterfactuals?
The function of counterfactuals is to allow us to probe these connections between facts. While D. Lewis (1981) proved that the Kratzer (1981b) analysis was a special case of similarity semantics, subsequent refinements of premise semantics in Kratzer (1989, 1990, 2002, 2012) and Veltman (2005) evidenced important differences. Kratzer (1989: 626) nicely captures the key difference:
What is a counterfactual in philosophy?
In philosophy and related fields, counterfactuals are taken to be sentences like: (1) If colonial powers hadn’t invaded, the Americas would be very different. This entry will follow this widely used terminology to avoid confusion. However, this usage also promotes a confusion worth dispelling.
How does counterfactual reasoning help rational agency?
The idea that counterfactual reasoning is central to rational agency has surfaced in another way in cognitive science and artificial intelligence, where encoding counterfactual-supporting relationships has emerged as a major theory of mental representation (Chater et al. 2010). These disciplines also study how states of mind like belief, desire, and intention explain rational agency. But they are not satisfied with just showing that certain states of mind can explain certain choices and actions. They aim to explain how those particular states of mind lead to those choices and actions. They do so by characterizing those states of mind in terms of representations, and formulating particular algorithms for using those representations to learn, make choices and perform actions. [ 9] Many recent advances in cognitive science and artificial intelligence share a starting point with Bayesian epistemology: agents must learn and decide what to do despite being uncertain what exactly the world is like, and these processes can be modeled in the probability calculus. On a simple Bayesian approach, an agent represents the world with a probability distribution over binary facts or variables that represent what the world is like. But even for very simple domains the probability calculus does not provide computationally tractable representations and algorithms for implementing Bayesian intelligence. The tools of Bayesian networks, structural equations and causal models, developed by Spirtes, Glymour, and Scheines (1993, 2000) and Pearl (2000, 2009) address this limitation, and also afford simple algorithms for causal and counterfactual reasoning, among other cognitive processes. This framework represents an agent’s knowledge in a way that puts counterfactuals and causal connections at the center, and the tools it provides have been influential beyond cognitive science and AI. It has also been applied to topics covered later in this entry: the semantic analyses of counterfactuals ( §3.2 ) and metaphysical dependence, causation and scientific explanation ( §1.3 ). For this reason, it will be useful to describe its basics now, though still focusing on its applications to mental representation. What follows is a simplified version of the accessible introduction in Sloman (2005: Ch.4). For a more thorough introduction, see Pearl (2009: Ch.1).
How do counterfactuals and semantics interact?
The semantics of counterfactuals have interacted with this project in a number of ways: in establishing their non-equivalence, refining them, and adjudicating putative counterexamples.
What are the two semantic analyses of counterfactuals?
This section will survey two semantic analyses of counterfactuals: the strict conditional analysis and the similarity analysis. These conceptually related analyses also have a shared explanatory goal: to capture logically valid inferences involving counterfactuals, while treating them non-truth-functionally, leaving room for their context dependence, and addressing the non-monotonic interpretation of counterfactual antecedents. Crucially, these analyses abstract away Goodman’s Problem because they are not primarily concerned with the truth-conditions of particular counterfactuals—just as classical logic does not take a stand on which atomic sentences are actually true. Instead, they say only enough about truth-conditions to settle matters of logic, e.g., if ϕ ϕ and ϕ> ψ ϕ > ψ are true, then ψ ψ is true. Sections 2.5 and 2.6 will revisit questions about the truth-conditions of particular counterfactuals, Goodman’s Problem and the philosophical projects surveyed in §1.
Who discovered that adding more information to the antecedent can actually turn a true counterfactual into a false?
Perhaps the most influential semantic puzzle about counterfactuals was highlighted by Goodman (1947), who noticed that adding more information to the antecedent can actually turn a true counterfactual into a false one. For example, (20a) could be true, while (20b) is false.
When are conditional probabilities independent of A?
Conditional probabilities allow one to say when B is probabilistically independent of A: when an agent’s credence in B is the same as their credence in B conditional on A and conditional on [Math Processing Error] ¬ A.
What is the difference between additive and subtractive counterfactual?
A counterfactual statement may involve the action or inaction of an event that originally took place. An additive statement involves engaging in an event that did not originally occur (e.g., I should have taken medicine) whereas a subtractive statement involves removing an event that took place (e.g., I should have never started drinking ). Additive counterfactuals are more frequent than subtractive counterfactuals.
How does counterfactual thinking affect collective action?
On the other hand, at a group level, counterfactual thinking can lead to collective action. According to Milesi and Catellani (2011), political activists exhibit group commitment and are more likely to re-engage in collective action following a collective defeat and show when they are engage in counterfactual thinking. Unlike the cognitive processes involved at individual level, abstract counterfactuals lead to an increase in group identification, which is positively correlated with collective action intention. The increase in group identification impacts on people's affect. Abstract counterfactuals also lead to an increase in group efficacy. Increase in group efficacy translates to belief that the group has the ability to change outcomes in situations. This in turn motivates group members to make group-based actions to attain their goal in the future.
How does perceived power affect counterfactual thinking?
Recent research by Scholl and Sassenberg (2014) looked to determine how perceived power in the situation can affect the counterfactual thought and process associated to understanding future directions and outlooks. The research examined how manipulating the perceived power of the individual in the given circumstance can lead to different thoughts and reflections, noting that "demonstrated that being powerless (vs. powerful) diminished self-focused counterfactual thinking by lowering sensed personal control". These results may show a relationship between how the self perceives events and determines the best course of action for future behavior.
What is the activation portion of counterfactual thinking?
First, there is the activation portion. This activation is whether we allow the counterfactual thought to seep into our conscious thought. The second portion involves content. This content portion creates the end scenario for the antecedent.
What are the two types of counterfactual thoughts?
There are two types of counterfactual thoughts, downward and upward. Downward counterfactuals are thoughts about how the situation could have been worse; and people tend to have a more positive view of the actual outcome. Upward counterfactuals are thoughts about how the situation could have been better.
Why do bronze medalists think they are more satisfied with the outcome than silver medalists?
In the case of Olympic Medalists, counterfactual thinking explains why bronze medalists are often more satisfied with the outcome than silver medalists. The counterfactual thoughts for silver medalists tend to focus on how close they are to the gold medal, up ward counterfactually thinking about the event, whereas bronze medalists tend to counterfactual think about how they could have not received a medal at all , displaying downward counterfactual thinking.
Why do we use counterfactual theory?
Risk aversion. Main article: Risk aversion (psychology) Another reason we continue to use counterfactual theory is to avoid situations that may be unpleasant to us, which is part of our approach and avoidance behavior. Often, people make a conscious effort to avoid situations that may make them feel unpleasant.
How do counterfactuals help people?
Counterfactuals lead people to assign blame to actions that may have caused events. People imagine, through counterfactual thinking, how outcomes may have been different if controllable events were changed. Counterfactual thinking helps people to simulate, or imagine, multiple possibilities.
What are the uses of counterfactual thinking?
Use cases for counterfactual thinking include recommender systems, historical analysis and explainable AI. By better understanding how humans think counterfactually, through ongoing research, counterfactual analysis can be used to improve explainable AI. References.
What is counterfactual analysis?
Counterfactual analysis (or counterfactual thinking) explores outcomes that did not actually occur, but which could have occurred under different conditions.
Why do people use counterfactuals?
People tend to use counterfactuals to imagine how outcomes might have been better, rather than worse. Counterfactuals help people identify cause-and-effect relationships for events.
What is the output of a recommender system?
The data provided by a recommender system, for instance, is limited by its observations. A typical output would be the number of recommended articles a user had downloaded.
Is counterfactual analysis useful?
Counterfactual analysis is even useful in macroeconomics. A recent study 2 explored the effectiveness of US monetary policy using a counterfactual approach. When combined with simple modeling, the authors consider this to be more reliable than using complex models with incomplete information.
Can you have taken left ave and less traffic?
But you could have taken Left Ave and had less traffic. The outcome—less traffic—did not actually occur but could have occurred if you had taken a different road. This is an example of a counterfactual, and in this case helps to test the causal relationship between the choice of road (Right Ave) and the amount of traffic (outcome).
What is the difference between a counterfactual and a subjunctive?
For instance, the term "counterfactual" is sometimes applied to conditionals that express a contrary-to-fact meaning, regardless of their grammatical structure. Along similar lines, the term "subjunctive" is sometimes used to refer to conditionals that bear fake past or irrealis marking, regardless of the meaning they convey.
What is a counterfactual conditional?
Counterfactual conditionals (also subjunctive or X-marked) are conditional sentences which discuss what would have been true under different circumstances, e.g. "If Peter believed in ghosts, he would be afraid to be here." Counterfactuals are contrasted with indicatives, which are generally restricted to discussing open possibilities. Counterfactuals are characterized grammatically by their use of fake tense morphology, which some languages use in combination with other kinds of morphology including aspect and mood .
What is counterfactual in belief revision?
You can help by adding to it. (September 2020) In the belief revision framework, counterfactuals are treated using a formal implementation of the Ramsey test. In these systems, a counterfactual A > B holds if and only if the addition of A to the current body of knowledge has B as a consequence .
What is the most common logical account of counterfactuals?
The most common logical accounts of counterfactuals are couched in the possible world semantics. Broadly speaking, these approaches have in common that they treat a counterfactual A > B as true if B holds across some set of possible worlds where A is true. They vary mainly in how they identify the set of relevant A-worlds.
What is counterfactual theory?
Counterfactuals are one of the most studied phenomena in philosophical logic, formal semantics, and philosophy of language. They were first discussed as a problem for the material conditional analysis of conditionals, which treats them all as trivially true. Starting in the 1960s, philosophers and linguists developed the now-classic possible world approach, in which a counterfactual's truth hinges on its consequent holding at certain possible worlds where its antecedent holds. More recent formal analyses have treated them using tools such as causal models and dynamic semantics. Other research has addressed their metaphysical, psychological, and grammatical underpinnings, while applying some of the resultant insights to fields including history, marketing, and epidemiology.
What is indicative conditional?
These conditionals differ in both form and meaning. The indicative conditional uses the present tense form "is" in both the "if" clause and the "then" clause. As a result, it conveys that the speaker is agnostic about whether it is raining. The counterfactual example uses the fake tense form "was" in the "if" clause and the modal "would" in the "then" clause. As a result, it conveys that the speaker does not believe that it is raining.
Is a natural language conditional true?
According to the material conditional analysis, a natural language conditional, a statement of the form ‘if P then Q’, is true whenever its antecedent, P, is false. Since counterfactual conditionals are those whose antecedents are false, this analysis would wrongly predict that all counterfactuals are vacuously true. Goodman illustrates this point using the following pair in a context where it is understood that the piece of butter under discussion had not been heated.
Why do people use counterfactuals?
Downward counterfactuals have their uses too. They particularly help people feel better in the aftermath of misfortune. When something bad happens, people say, “It could have been worse,” and contemplating those even more terrible counterfactuals is comforting.
What is counterfactual thinking?
Counterfactual means “contrary to the facts.”. Counterfactual thinking refers to reconstructive thoughts about a past event, in which antecedents to the event are mentally mutated ...
Why is counterfactual thinking important?
Ultimately, counterfactual thinking is probably one of the crucial traits that has helped people create and sustain the marvels of human society and culture. Most animals can barely perceive and understand the world as it is, but we can dream of how it can be different. Democracy, women’s liberation, and wireless technology did not exist in nature, but human beings were able to look at life as it was and imagine how it could be different, and these imaginings helped them change the world for the better.
What is the first instinct fallacy?
Krueger and his colleagues have dubbed this tendency the first instinct fallacy, defined as the false belief that it is better not change one’s first answer even if one starts to think a different answer is correct.
What would you feel if you wrote the wrong answer?
You’d feel less regret if you had first written the wrong answer and then refused to change it, because in that scenario you had never put down the right answer. Having first written the correct answer and then erased it makes you feel that you were so close to getting it correct that changing was a terrible mistake.
Why is it good to make upward counterfactuals?
People make far more upward than downward counterfactuals, which is probably a good thing because it causes people to consider how to make things better in the future (Roese & Olson, 1997). For example, if Eduardo looks back on his exam and regrets not studying harder so he could have earned a higher grade, he will probably study harder next time.
Who is Douglas Hofstandter?
Douglas Hofstandter, cognitive science professor at Indiana University and author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, wrote, “Think how immeasurably poorer our mental lives would be if we didn’t have this creative capacity for slipping out of the midst of reality into soft ‘what ifs’!” (Hofstandter, 1979).
What is counterfactual probability?
Counterfactuals are "personalized" in the sense that you'd expect the answer to change if you substitute a different person in there. My father has a mustache, (let's classify that as a type of beard for pedagogical purposes), but he does not have a PhD degree. I expect that preventing him to grow a mustache would not have made him any more likely to obtain a PhD. So his counterfactual probability would be a probability close to 0.
What is intervention conditional p?
in other words, the intervention conditional p ( y | d o ( X = x ^)) is the average of counterfactuals over the obserevable population. This was something that I did did not realize before my MLSS tutorial, and it was pointed out to me by a student in the form of a question. In hindsight, of course this is true!
Why are counterfactuals unscientific?
Counterfactuals are often said to be unscientific, primarily because they are not empirically testable. In normal ML we are used to benchmark datasets, and that the quality of our predictions can always be tested on some test dataset. In causal ML, not everything can be directly tested or empirically benchmarked.
What is causal diagram?
The causal diagram lets us reason about the distribution of data in an alternative world, a parallel universe if you like, in which everyone is somehow magically prevented to grow a beard. You can imagine sampling a dataset from this distribution, shown in the green table. We can measure the association between PhD degrees and beards in this green distribution, which is precisely what 🎓 🧔 p ( 🎓 | d o ( 🧔 = 0)) means. As shown by the arrow below the tables, 🎓 🧔 p ( 🎓 | d o ( 🧔 = 0)) is about predicting columns of the green dataset from other columns of the green dataset.
What are the parts of causal inferenece?
If you're new to causal inferenece, I recommend you start from the earlier posts: Part 1: Intro to causal inference and do-calculus. Part 2: Illustrating Interventions with a Toy Example. ➡️️ Part 3: Counterfactuals. Part 4: Causal Diagrams, Markov Factorization, Structural Equation Models.
What is the simplest thing one can do to attempt to answer my counterfactual question?
Let's start with the simplest thing one can do to attempt to answer my counterfactual question: collect some data about individuals, whether they have beards, whether they have PhDs, whether they are married, whether they are fit, etc. Here's a cartoon illustration of such dataset:
What is a counterfactual question?
A counterfactual question is about a specific datapoint, in this case Alice.
Counterfactuals and Philosophy
The Logic of Counterfactuals
- This section will survey two semantic analyses of counterfactuals: thestrict conditional analysis and thesimilarity analysis. These conceptually relatedanalyses also have a shared explanatory goal: to capture logicallyvalid inferences involving counterfactuals, while treating themnon-truth-functionally, leaving room for their context dependence, andaddressing the non-monotonic inter…
Semantic Theories of Counterfactual Dependence
- Similarity and strict analyses nowhere refer to facts, orpropositions, depending on eachother. Indeed, 1979 was primarilyconcerned with explaining which true counterfactuals, given asimilarity analysis, manifest a relation of counterfactualdependence. Other analyses have instead started with the idea thatfacts depend on each other, and then explain...
Conclusion
- Philosophers, linguists, and psychologists remain fiercely divided onhow to best understand counterfactuals. Rightly so. They are at thecenter of questions of deep human interest (§1). The renaissance on this topic in the 1970s and 1980s focused onaddressing certain semantic puzzles and capturing the logic ofcounterfactuals (§2). From this seminal literature, similarity analyses (D…
Summary
Counterfactual thinking is a concept in psychology that involves the human tendency to create possible alternatives to life events that have already occurred; something that is contrary to what actually happened. Counterfactual thinking is, as it states: "counter to the facts". These thoughts consist of the "What if?" and the "If I had only..." that occur when thinking of how things could have turned out differently. Counterfactual thoughts include things that – in the present – now co…
Types
Upward counterfactual thinking focuses on how the situation could have been better. Many times, people think about what they could have done differently. For example, "If I started studying three days ago, instead of last night, I could have done better on my test." Since people often think about what they could have done differently, it is not uncommon for people to feel regret during upward counterfactual thinking.
Overview
The term "Counterfactual" is defined by the Merriam-Webster Dictionary as contrary to the facts. A counterfactual thought occurs when a person modifies a factual prior event and then assesses the consequences of that change. A person may imagine how an outcome could have turned out differently, if the antecedents that led to that event were different. For example, a person may reflect upon how a car accident could have turned out by imagining how some of the factors coul…
History
The origin of counterfactual thinking has philosophical roots and can be traced back to early philosophers such as Aristotle and Plato who pondered the epistemological status of subjunctive suppositions and their nonexistent but feasible outcomes. In the seventeenth century, the German philosopher, Leibniz, argued that there could be an infinite number of alternate worlds, so long as they were not in conflict with laws of logic. The well known philosopher Nicholas Rescher (as wel…
Activation
There are two portions to counterfactual thinking. First, there is the activation portion. This activation is whether we allow the counterfactual thought to seep into our conscious thought. The second portion involves content. This content portion creates the end scenario for the antecedent.
The activation portion leads into the mystery of why we allow ourselves to think of other alternatives that could have been beneficial or harmful to us. It is believed that humans tend to t…
Functional basis
One may wonder why we continue to think in counterfactual ways if these thoughts tend to make us feel guilty or negatively about an outcome. One of the functional reasons for this is to correct for mistakes and to avoid making them again in the future. If a person is able to consider another outcome based on a different path, they may take that path in the future and avoid the undesired outcome. It is obvious that the past cannot be changed, however, it is likely that similar situation…
Current research
As with many cognitive processes in the brain, current and upcoming research seeks to gain better insight into the functions and outcomes of how we think. Research for counterfactual thinking has recently been investigating various effects and how they might alter or contribute to counterfactual thinking. One study by Rim and Summerville (2014) investigated the distance of the event in terms of time and how this length of time can affect the process by which counterfactua…
Theories
Kahneman and Miller (1986) proposed the norm theory as a theoretical basis to describe the rationale for counterfactual thoughts. Norm theory suggests that the ease of imagining a different outcome determines the counterfactual alternatives created. Norms involve a pairwise comparison between a cognitive standard and an experiential outcome. A discrepancy elicits an affective response which is influenced by the magnitude and direction of the difference. For example, if a …