What We Can Learn from Causal Conditional Reasoning about the Naïve Understanding of Causality

Causal conditional reasoning means drawing inferences from a conditional statement that refers to causal content. It is argued that data on causal conditional reasoning not only tell us something about how people draw deductive inferences from conditionals, but also provide us with information about how they understand causal relations. In particular, three principles emerge from existing data: the modal principle, the exhaustive principle, and the equivalence principle. An experiment sheds new light on how people interpret and use conditionals in causal contexts, and reveals evidence for the proposed representational principles.