Counterfactual Reasoning: Developing a Sense of “Nearest Possible World”

Counterfactual Reasoning: How to Organize a Possible World

Counterfactual reasoning appears to be a universal phenomenon of human inference from childhood to adulthood, yet, the prevailing explanations seem able to capture only a limited aspect of the process and are in need of an overarching framework. We propose that David Lewis’ possible worlds analysis offers a first approximation to such a framework and gives a psychologically plausible account of...

Deductive reasoning with factual, possible, and counterfactual conditionals.

We compared reasoners' inferences from conditionals based on possibilities in the present or the past (e.g., "If Linda had been in Dublin then Cathy would have been in Galway") with their inferences based on facts in the present or the past (e.g., "If Linda was in Dublin then Cathy was in Galway"). We propose that people construct a richer representation of conditionals that deal with possibili...

Possible World Semantics for Analogous Reasoning

A Theory of First-Order Counterfactual Reasoning

A new theory of evaluating counterfactual statements is presented based on the established predicate calculus formalism of the Fluent Calculus for reasoning about actions. The assertion of a counterfactual antecedent is axiomatized as the performance of a special action. An existing solution to the Ramification Problem in the Fluent Calculus, where indirect effects of actions are accounted for ...

A unified theory of counterfactual reasoning

A successful theory of causal reasoning should be able to account for inferences about counterfactual scenarios. Pearl (2000) has developed a formal account of causal reasoning that has been highly influential but that suffers from at least two limitations as an account of counterfactual reasoning: it does not distinguish between counterfactual observations and counterfactual interventions, and...