Paraphrases of Counterfactual and Causal Conditionals

Introduction Counterfactual conditionals seem to be understood differently from factual conditionals. People may understand a factual conditional, e.g., ‘if Joe cut his finger it bled’ by initially envisaging just one true possibility, ‘Joe cut his finger and it bled’ (Johnson-Laird & Byrne, 1991; 2002). Counterfactual conditionals are different. People understand a counterfactual, e.g., ‘if Joe had cut his finger it would have bled’ by keeping in mind several possibilities. They think about the conjecture ‘Joe cut his finger and it bled’ and about the presupposed facts, ‘Joe did not cut his finger and it did not bleed’ (Byrne & Tasso, 1999). Causal relations are often expressed in conditional ‘if’ assertions. There are different sorts of causal relations, such as strong ones, e.g., ‘if Joe cut his finger it bled’, weak ones, e.g., ‘if the apples were ripe they fell off the tree’, and enabling ones, e.g., ‘if the ignition key was turned the car started’. People think about different sorts of possibilities when they understand them (Goldvarg & Johnson-Laird, 2001). Our aim was to examine whether people form different mental representations of factual and counterfactual conditionals, and different representations of strong, weak, and enabling causal relations.