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LINGUISTIX&LOGIK, Tony Marmo's blog
Friday, 30 December 2005

Topic: Counterfactuals

Branching Space- Time, Modal Logic and the Counterfactual Conditional


By Thomas Muller

The paper gives a physicist's view on the framework of branching space-time (Belnap, Synthese 92 (1992), 385–434). Branching models are constructed from physical state assignments. The models are then employed to give a formal semantics for the modal operators possibly and necessarily and for the counterfactual conditional. The resulting formal language can be used to analyse quantum correlation experiments. As an application sketch, Stapp's premises LOC1 and LOC2 from his purported proof of non-locality (Am. J. Phys. 65 (1997), 300–304) are analysed.

Posted by Tony Marmo at 00:01 GMT
Updated: Friday, 30 December 2005 16:34 GMT
Sunday, 11 December 2005

Topic: Counterfactuals

The Myth of the Categorical Counterfactual
By David Barnett

Remarkably, standard theories presuppose that, contrary to their surface form, counterfactuals are actually categorical statements. On this view, to state that, if it were that A, it would be that C is to state something, not relative to any supposition or hypothesis, but categorically. Differences in detail among the standard theories are differences over which thing is categorically stated by a counterfactual. Nelson Goodman (1947) says that it is an entailment from the antecedent, together with laws of nature and particular facts about the actual world, to the consequent; Robert Stalnaker (1968) says that it is a predication of a single possible world; and David Lewis (1973) says that it is an existential generalization over a set of possible worlds.

By contrast, W.V.O. Quine (1950), John Mackie (1973), Michael Dummett (1978), and Dorothy Edgington (1995) maintain that counterfactuals are as their surface form suggests: conditional statements. I defend this view by presenting a datum that no categorical interpretation can accommodate. The only way to accommodate the datum is to turn to a conditional, or what I shall call a suppositional interpretation, on which to state that, if it were that A, it would be that C is to state, from within the scope of the supposition that it were that A, that it would be that C. On this view, what is stated by a counterfactual is that it would be that C, and what is supposed by it is that it were that A. Counterfactual statements are acts of supposing-cum-stating. The idea of a categorical counterfactual one that states what it does outside the scope of any suppositionis a myth.


Posted by Tony Marmo at 15:52 GMT
Thursday, 8 December 2005

Topic: Counterfactuals

Counterfactual Cognitive Operations in Dreams


By Patrick McNamara, Jensine Andresen, Joshua Arrowood, & Glen Messer

We hypothesized that counterfactual (CF) thought occurs in dreams and that cognitive operations in dreams function to identify a norm violation or novel outcome (recorded in episodic memory) and then to integrate this new content into memory by generating counterfactuals to the violation. In study 1 we compared counterfactual content in 50 dream reports, 50 pain memory reports and 50 pleasant memory reports (equated for word length) and found a significantly greater number of CFs in dream and in pain memory reports relative to pleasant memory reports. In study 2 we used a more liberal method for scoring CF content and analyzed 34 dream reports obtained from elderly individuals engaged in an ongoing study of neuropsychologic, health and religiosity variables. Study 2 also examined neuropsychologic associations to CF content variables. In the elderly sample and with our more liberal scoring procedures we found that norm violations along with counterfactual-like attempts to correct the violations occurred in 97% of reports. In 47% of these cases (roughly half of all reports), attempts to undo the violation obeyed at least one constraint on mutability typically observed in laboratory studies of CF processing. Cognitive operations associated with attempts to undo the norm violation (e.g. transforming focal actors or the most recent causal antecedent of the violation) were significantly correlated with measures of right frontal function. We conclude that dreaming may involve a process of learning from novel outcomes (particularly negative outcomes) by simulating alternative ways of handling these outcomes through counterfactual cognitive processes.

Source: Dreaming, Vol. 12 No. 3, September 2002



Posted by Tony Marmo at 18:43 GMT

Topic: Counterfactuals

Conditionals as Definite Descriptions
(A Referential Analysis)


By Philippe Schlenker

In Counterfactuals, David Lewis noticed that definite descriptions and conditionals display the same kind of non-monotonic behavior. We take his observation literally and suggest that if-clauses are, quite simply, definite descriptions of possible worlds (related ideas are developed in Bittner 2001). We depart from Lewis's analysis, however, in claiming that if-clauses, like Strawsonian definite descriptions, refer. We develop our analysis by drawing both on Stalnaker's Selection Function theory of conditionals and on von Heusinger's Choice Function theory of definiteness, and by generalizing their analyses to plural Choice/Selection Functions.
Finally, we explore some consequences of this referential approach: being definites, if-clauses can be topicalized; the word then can be analyzed as a pronoun which doubles the referential term; the syntactician's Binding Theory constrains possible anaphoric relations between the if-clause and the word then; and general systems of referential classification can be applied to situate the denotation of the descriptive term, yielding a distinction between indicative, subjunctive and `double subjunctive' conditionals.

keywords: definite descriptions, conditionals, semantics

Reference: lingBuzz/000215


Posted by Tony Marmo at 13:00 GMT
Updated: Thursday, 8 December 2005 18:46 GMT
Saturday, 3 December 2005

Now Playing: COUNTERFACTUALS WEEK (REPOSTED)
Topic: Counterfactuals

An Objective Counterfactual Theory of Information



By Jonathan Cohen & Aaron Meskin

Philosophers have appealed to information (as understood by [Shannon, 1948] and introduced to philosophers largely by [Dretske, 1981]) in a wide variety of contexts; information has been proffered in the service of understanding knowledge, justification, and mental content, inter alia. However, the standard accounts of information in circulation suffer from two defects. First, while they construe information in terms of probabilities, the particular conditional probabilities they appeal to are difficult to make sense of on any of the usual understandings of probability. Second, standard accounts relativize the information carried by a signal to the background knowledge of the receiver, and consequently make essential reference to doxastic states of subjects; but if so, then information can't provide the objective, reductive explanations of notions in epistemology and philosophy of mind that many have hoped it could. This paper is an attempt to solve these problems, and thereby to restore the metaphysical bona fides of information.
We'll begin by showing why the usual, probabilistic understandings of information are unsatisfactory (?1). Next we'll go on to propose an alternative account based on counterfactuals (?2), and compare it against Dretske's more familiar account (?3). After that, we'll turn to questions about objectivity: we'll argue that information should not be relativized to doxastic states of subjects, and show how the account of ?2 can be formulated in non-doxastic terms (?4). Finally, we'll consider objections against the our proposed account (?5). At the end of the day, we'll suggest, the objective counterfactual account of information should be taken as a serious contender to more traditional rivals.

Source: Online Papers in Philosophy

Posted by Tony Marmo at 00:01 GMT
Updated: Sunday, 4 December 2005 07:11 GMT

Now Playing: COUNTERFACTUALS WEEK
Topic: Counterfactuals

Useful Counterfactuals


By Tom Costello & John McCarthy

Counterfactual conditional sentences can be useful in artificial intelligence as they are in human affairs. In particular, they allow reasoners to learn from experiences that they did not quite have. Our tools for making inferences from counterfactuals permit inferring sentences that are not themselves counterfactual. This is what makes them useful. A simple class of useful counterfactuals involves a change of one component of a point in a space provided with a cartesian product structure. We call these cartesian counterfactuals. Cartesian counterfactuals can be modeled by assignment and contents functions as in program semantics. We also consider the more general tree-structured counterfactuals.

Posted by Tony Marmo at 00:01 GMT
Updated: Sunday, 4 December 2005 01:04 GMT

Now Playing: COUNTERFACTUALS WEEK
Topic: Counterfactuals

Branching Space-Time, Modal Logic and the Counterfactual Conditional


By Thomas Muller

The paper gives a physicist's view on the framework of branching space-time (Belnap, Synthese 92 (1992), 385?434). Branching models are constructed from physical state assignments. The models are then employed to give a formal semantics for the modal operators possibly and necessarily and for the counterfactual conditional. The resulting formal language can be used to analyze quantum correlation experiments. As an application sketch, Stapp's premises LOC1 and LOC2 from his purported proof of non-locality ( Am. J. Phys. 65 (1997), 300?304) are analyzed.

Posted by Tony Marmo at 00:01 GMT
Updated: Sunday, 4 December 2005 07:09 GMT
Tuesday, 8 March 2005

Now Playing: COUNTERFACTUALS WEEK
Topic: Counterfactuals

A Computational Model of Counterfactual Thinking: The Temporal Order Effect


By Clare R. Walsh & Ruth M.J. Byrne

People generate counterfactual alternatives to reality when they think about how things might have happened differently, if only. There are considerable regularities in the sorts of past events that people mentally undo, for example, they tend to mentally undo the most recent event in an independent sequence. Consider a game in which two contestants will win #1000 if they both pick cards from the same color suite. The first player picks black and the second red and they lose. Most people spontaneously undo the outcome by thinking, if only the second player had picked black. We describe a computational model that simulates our theory of the mental representations and cognitive processes underlying this temporal order effect. The computer model is corroborated by tests of the novel predictions of our theory: it should be possible to reverse the temporal order effect by manipulating the way in which the winning conditions are described.

Posted by Tony Marmo at 10:05 GMT
Updated: Sunday, 4 December 2005 01:06 GMT

Now Playing: COUNTERFACTUALS WEEK
Topic: Counterfactuals

Counterfactuals and Policy Analysis in Structural Models


By Alexander Balke & Judea Pearl

Evaluation of counterfactual queries (e.g. If A were true, would C have been true?) is important to fault diagnosis, planning, determination of liability, and policy analysis. We present a method for evaluating counterfactuals when the underlying causal model is represented by structural models { a nonlinear generalization of the simultaneous equations models commonly used in econometrics and social sciences. This new method provides a coherent means for evaluating policies involving the control of variables which, prior to enacting the policy were inuenced by other variables in the system.

Posted by Tony Marmo at 00:01 GMT
Updated: Sunday, 4 December 2005 01:08 GMT

Now Playing: COUNTERFACTUALS WEEK
Topic: Counterfactuals

Counterfactuals and Updates as Inverse Modalities
By Mark Ryan and Pierre-Yves Schobbens

We point out a simple but hitherto ignored link between the theory of updates, the theory of counterfactuals, and classical modal logic: update is a classical existential modality, counterfactual is a classical universal modality, and the accessibility relations corresponding to these modalities are inverses. The Ramsey Rule (often thought esoteric) is simply an axiomatisation of this inverse relationship.

We use this fact to translate between rules for updates and rules for counterfactuals. Thus, Katsuno and Mendelzon?s postulates U1--U8 are translated into counterfactual rules C1--C8 (Table VII), and many of the familiar counterfactual rules are translated into rules for updates (Table VIII). Our conclusions are summarised in Table V.

From known properties of inverse modalities we deduce that not all rules for updates may be translated into rules for counterfactuals, and vice versa. We present a syntactic condition which is sufficient to guarantee that a translation from update to counterfactual (or vice versa) is possible.

Posted by Tony Marmo at 00:01 GMT
Updated: Sunday, 4 December 2005 07:09 GMT
Monday, 7 March 2005

Now Playing: REPOSTED
Topic: Counterfactuals

Counterfactual Thinking as a Mechanism in Narrative Persuasion


by Nurit Tal-Or, David S. Boninger, Amir Poran and Faith Gleicher

Two experiments examined the impact of counterfactual thinking on persuasion. Participants in both experiments were exposed to short video clips in which an actor described a car accident that resulted in serious injury. In the narrative description, the salience of a counterfactual was manipulated by either explicitly including the counterfactual in the narrative or by not including it. An examination of attitudes related to traffic safety supported the hypothesis that the inclusion of a counterfactual in narrative enhances the persuasive impact of the narrative. The first study (N= 50) demonstrated this effect in the short-term, and the second study ( N= 61) replicated the short-term effects while also demonstrating the temporal persistence of the initial changes in attitudes. Both studies highlighted potential limiting conditions of these effects. The first study showed that the impact of counterfactuals on persuasion is most potent when the self, rather than another person, is the focus of blame in the counterfactual. The second study revealed that attitude changes persist over time when the counterfactuals are self-generated, but not when they are spoon-fed to the participant. Results are discussed in the context of understanding the characteristics of counterfactual thoughts that enable them to enhance the persuasive impact of narrative.

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Posted by Tony Marmo at 00:01 GMT
Updated: Sunday, 4 December 2005 07:10 GMT

Now Playing: COUNTERFACTUALS WEEK (UPDATED)
Topic: Counterfactuals

Reason Explanations and Counterfactuals


By Robert M. Gordon

In evaluating conditionals concerning what a person would have done in counterfactual circumstances, we suppose the counterfactual antecedent to be true, just as in what I loosely term the standard "Ramsey" procedure; but then we follow a different path? a simulative path? in evaluating the consequent. The simulative path imposes an implicit restriction on possible worlds, a procedural guarantee that the individual simulated is aware of or knows about the counterfactual condition. This difference makes clear the way in which reason explanations are implicitly cognitive and psychological.
This implicit cognitivity has important consequences for conceptual development. If young children, even children of 2 or 3 years, follow the simulative path in interpreting counterfactuals about human action under counterfactual conditions, then they already give implicitly cognitive explanations. Their subsequent developmental task is chiefly to make explicit what they already ascribe implicitly. This will be is a process of subtraction, of shaving away some of the commitments a reason explanation makes.(...)

Posted by Tony Marmo at 00:01 GMT
Updated: Sunday, 4 December 2005 07:12 GMT

Now Playing: COUNTERFACTUALS WEEK (REPOSTED)
Topic: Counterfactuals

When Possibility Informs Reality: Counterfactual Thinking as a Cue to Causality


By Barbara A. Spellman & David R. Mandel

People often engage in counterfactual thinking, that is, imagining alternatives to the real world and mentally playing out the consequences. Yet the counterfactuals people tend to imagine are a small subset of those that could possibly be imagined. There is some debate as to the relation between counterfactual thinking and causal beliefs. Some researchers argue that counterfactual thinking is the key to causal judgments; current research suggests, however, that the relation is rather complex. When people think about counterfactuals, they focus on ways to prevent bad or uncommon outcomes; when people think about causes, they focus on things that covary with outcomes. Counterfactual thinking may affect causality judgments by changing beliefs about the probabilities of possible alternatives to what actually happened, thereby changing beliefs as to whether a cause and effect actually covary. The way in which counterfactual thinking affects causal attributions may have practical consequences for mental health and the legal system.

Current Directions in Psychological Science Volume 8 Issue 4 Page 120 - August 1999

Posted by Tony Marmo at 00:01 GMT
Updated: Sunday, 4 December 2005 07:11 GMT

Now Playing: COUNTERFACTUALS WEEK (REPOSTED)
Topic: Counterfactuals

Modals and a Compositional Account of Counterfactuals


By Nicholas Asher & Eric McCready

There are lots of modals that we might include in this account must, ought phi, should phi, all suggest universal quantifications over deontic possibilities while may, as Kamp (1973) suggested, introduces deontic possibilities. It's a delicate matter to ground the deontic alternatives in the epistemic possibilities (Asher 1987). But it appears that the following approach, on which we extended a dynamic semantics with a dynamic account of modals, can accommodate these modals as well. The semantics we have developed [here] handles both the modal subordination facts and Veltman-style update phenomena and it provides a compositional account of counterfactuals that has at least some pleasing features, including a connection to normality conditionals and the non-monotonic notion of inference that has come to be associated with them.

Source: Semantics Archive

Posted by Tony Marmo at 00:01 GMT
Updated: Sunday, 4 December 2005 07:13 GMT

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