Abstract / Description of output
A successful theory of causal reasoning should be able to account for inferences about counterfactual scenarios. Pearl (2000) has developed a formal account of causal reasoning that has been highly influential but that suffers from at least two limitations as an account of counterfactual reasoning: it does not distinguish between counterfactual observations and counterfactual interventions, and it does not accommodate back-tracking counterfactuals. We present an extension of Pearl’s account that overcomes both limitations. Our model provides a unified treatment of counterfactual interventions and back-tracking counterfactuals, and we show that it accounts for data collected by Sloman and Lagnado (2005) and Rips (2010).
| Original language | English |
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| Title of host publication | Proceedings of the 34th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, CogSci 2012, Sapporo, Japan, August 1-4, 2012 |
| Pages | 707-712 |
| Number of pages | 7 |
| Publication status | Published - 2012 |