Counterfactuals, Thought Experiments, and Singular Causal Analysis in History

Counterfactuals, Thought Experiments and Singular Causal Analysis in History

Thought experiments are ubiquitous in science but especially prominent in domains in which experimental and observational data are scarce. Thus, for instance, when the causal analysis of singular events such as the causes of a particular war, of the rise of a culture or of the economic performance of a country in a specific historical period is at stake. A longstanding tradition in history that...

Counterfactuals, Causal Inference, and Historical Analysis

Causal Responsibility and Counterfactuals

How do people attribute responsibility in situations where the contributions of multiple agents combine to produce a joint outcome? The prevalence of over-determination in such cases makes this a difficult problem for counterfactual theories of causal responsibility. In this article, we explore a general framework for assigning responsibility in multiple agent contexts. We draw on the structura...

Causal Inference with Counterfactuals

Note we are not asking whether aspirin cures headaches in some more general sense, we wish to know whether this specific headache went away because of the decision to take aspirin. The only sensible way to answer this sort of question in the case of a specific event is to compare the outcome which you observed with the counterfactual outcome which you would have observed if you had chosen not t...

Harm, History, and Counterfactuals