In the present study children’s counterfactual reasoning process is examined in belief contravening problems. The first part of this study uses the visual methodology created for adults by Revlin, Calvillo and Ballard (2005). By five, children display similar reasoning strategies as shown in the same task by adults. When confronted with a counterfactual assumption, children resolve the inconsis...

It has been repeatedly demonstrated that a robust predictor of the strength of an inductive argument is the similarity between the categories that are the focus of the induction. In this paper we evaluate why similarity is associated with the strength of such arguments. On one view, category similarity makes an argument strong because similarity is partially determined by features that are comm...

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 ...

2. A new type of causal models was formulated, based on embedding structural considerations in the language of sequential, temporal situation calculus. By using situation calculus as a basic language, we leverage its power to express complex, dynamically changing situations and, by relying on structural considerations, we can formulate an e ective theory of counterfactuals within the situationc...

Abductive reasoning in general describes the process of discovering hypotheses and rules that would entail a given conclusion. Abductive reasoning consists of assessing the likelihood that a specific hypothesis entails a given conclusion. Abductive reasoning based on probabilities is used in many disciplines, such as medical diagnostics, where medical test results combined with conditional prob...

Human conditional reasoning is defeasible: people withdraw logically valid conclusions if they are aware of situations (i.e., exceptions) that prevent the consequent of the rule to happen although the antecedent is given. In this paper we investigate defeasible reasoning with quantified rules. In two experiments we rephrased conditionals from the literature (Experiment 1) and rules from penal c...

A recent development in the cognitive science of reasoning has been the emergence of a probabilistic approach to the behaviour observed on ostensibly logical tasks. According to this approach the errors and biases documented on these tasks occur because people import their everyday uncertain reasoning strategies into the laboratory. Consequently participants' apparently irrational behaviour is ...

We present an integrated model for the understanding of and the reasoning from conditional statements. Central assumptions from several approaches are integrated into a causal path model. According to the model, the cognitive availability of exceptions to a conditional reduces the subjective conditional probability of the consequent, given the antecedent. This conditional probability determines...

This paper explores the role of causal explanations in evaluating counterfactual conditionals. In reasoning about what would have been the case if A had been true, the localist injunction to hold constant all the variables that causally influence whether A is true or not, is sometimes unreasonably constraining. We hypothesize that speakers may resolve this tension by including in their delibera...

We report 4 studies which show that there are systematic quantitative patterns in the way we reason with uncertainty during causal and counterfactual inference. Two specific type of uncertainty – uncertainty about facts and about causal relations – are explored, and used to model people’s causal inferences (Studies 1-3). We then consider the relationship between causal and counterfactual reason...