Counterfactual Undoing in Deterministic Causal Reasoning

Pearl (2000) offers a formal framework for modeling causal and counterfactual reasoning. By virtue of the way it represents intervention on a causal system, the framework makes predictions about how people reason when asked counterfactual questions about causal relations. Four studies are reported that test the application of the framework to deterministic causal and conditional arguments. The results support the proposed representation of causal arguments, especially when the nature of the counterfactual intervention is made explicit. The results also show that conditional relations are construed in different ways.