Showing papers on "Counterfactual conditional published in 1992"

What might have been: Counterfactual thought concerning personal decisions

Abstract: Counterfactual thinking entails the process of imagining alternatives to reality —what might have been. The present study explores the incidence and content of counterfactual thinking about personal decisions in three samples of adults. The results indicate, first, that counterfactual thought occurs frequently among normal adults, with approximately half of each sample reporting that they would do something differently if they had their lives to live over. Secondly, there appear to be common themes to the counterfactuals reported in various real-life domains. For example, it is common to imagine states counter to the realities of having married early, having curtailed one's education, and having experienced unsatisfactory interpersonal relationships. In general, it appears that decisions and events that were unusual, that have proved less than ideal, or that have prematurely closed off important life options most often generate counterfactual thinking.

David Lewis Meets John Bell

Abstract: The violation of the Bell inequality means that measurement-results in the two wings of the experiment cannot be screened off from one another, in the sense of Reichenbach. But does this mean that there is causation between the results? I argue that it does, according to Lewis's counterfactual analysis of causation and his associated views. The reason lies in his doctrine that chances evolve by conditionalization on intervening history. This doctrine collapses the distinction between the conditional probabilities that are used to state screening off, and the counterfactuals with chance consequents that are used to state lack of causation. I briefly discuss ways to evade my argument.

Is It A Bad Idea To Study Good Judgment

Abstract: Wittgenstein warned in his Philosophical Investigations of the danger of saying too much: "Whereof one cannot know, thereof one should not speak." This pithy aphorism came to mind more than once in writing my own article and in assembling the other articles for this symposium. The problems in defining criteria for good political judgment are staggering. To label an act or opinion a manifestation of good judgment is to imply that one knows: (a) the true state of the political world; (b) the values that should guide decision-makers in coping with the world. Neither implication is usually justified. Can we say with confidence that, given the information available to him, Chamberlain was wrong to try to appease Hitler? Or that Churchill was right to oppose appeasement? Can we conclude that the Reagan defense build-up in the early 1980s facilitated, impeded, or had no effect on the emergence of "new thinking" in Soviet foreign policy? These questions raise controversy, in part, because their answers hinge on complex counterfactual reconstructions of history (cf. Tetlock, McGuire, & Mitchell, 1991). Who knows how events would have unfolded if Churchill had plotted British foreign policy in the late 1930s or if a liberal American president were in charge in the early 1980s? The questions also raise controversy because any political decision ultimately rests on more than educated guesses about counterfactuals. Political decisions require balancing conflicting goals. In this case, there is the risk of rendering oneself vulnerable to a predatory aggressor by appearing too weak, versus the risk of appearing too threatening and thus provoking a war that could have been avoided on mutually acceptable terms. What reason is there to believe that political psychologists have better insights into either counterfactual history or moral philosophy than anyone else? This argument is a powerful one and, to be candid, it nearly persuaded me to abandon this project at its inception. The argument does, however, have a notso-subtle flaw. It presumes that we can somehow prevent scholars from mak

Epistemic semantics for counterfactuals

Abstract: Stalnaker and Lewis fixed Ramsey's suggestion into possible world semantics in effect by turning it into truth conditions. More natural, perhaps, would be to interpret it epistemically, as a belief or acceptability condition: A conditional is to be accepted in a particular body of beliefs just in case adjusting those beliefs so as to accommodate its antecedent would result in belief in its consequent. Where the conditional is a counterfactual the adjustments to be made in accommodating its antecedent would involve revision, or suspending old beliefs so as to make way for new. Relatively recently some philosophers have become interested in revision at a quite abstract level, seeking general methods for revising bodies of information and general constraints on the rationality of these methods. One such constraint is already implicit in Stalnaker's paraphrase of the Ramsey rule, where adjustments are to be made in order to maintain consistency. It would be irrational to start believing just anything or learning something new, unless of course the new belief is itself contradictory. In order to study the formal properties of belief revision, Peter Giirdenfors has introduced the notion of belief revision models, which are systems of belief states together with revision functions saying how to revise these so as to accommodate new beliefs. The Ramsey rule provides an obvious interpretation for conditionals in belief

If . . .: Counterfactuals in the Law

Abstract: This Article considers some of the uses of counterfactuals in the law. Counterfactuals are a type of conditional statement. Conditional statements express the idea that something is or will be the case (the consequent), provided that some other situation is realized (the antecedent). Conditionals often take the form "if p then q", Counterfactuals are conditionals in which the author expresses the knowledge or belief that the antecedent is false.

Xii* probabilities and conditionals: distinctions by example

Abstract: The example works for probability as subjective or objective-and whether or not objective probability is taken to require irreducible indeterminism. As to the connective ->, I shall consider only Lewis' counterfactual conditional. But this is for reasons of space: the example can be adapted to other conditionals such as the strict conditional, and the Stalnaker conditional. The first of these distinctions, between (CondProb) and (ProbCond), is well recognized. In a famous paper (1976), David Lewis proved that these two must in some cases have different truth-values (i.e. for some A and C, pr(C/A) ? pr(A -C)), on pain of making any two propositions stochastically independent-which cannot be so except in a few trivial cases. And since Lewis' paper, there has been a series of similar results. As to the distinctions between (ProbCons) and the other two, there is (so far as I know) no single seminal paper. But various

On the linguistic shaping of thought: Another response to Alfred Bloom

Abstract: Bloom (1981, 1984) linked the existence of specific grammatical constructions – for example, the counterfactual conditional in English – to the development of a labeled cognitive schema specific to counterfactual thought. He claimed that because the Chinese language lacks an equivalent grammatical marker, Chinese speakers do not develop the corresponding cognitive schema and thus process counterfactuals “less naturally” (1981:22) than English speakers. Whereas attempts to replicate Bloom (Au 1983, 1984; Liu 1985) questioned the extent to which such differences exist, this article demonstrates that where differences in counterfactual response patterns clearly do exist, they cannot be attributed to the presence/absence of a linguistic “counterfactual” construction.

Counterfactuals and the applications of mathematics

Abstract: It has been argued that the attempt to meet indispensability arguments for realism in mathematics, by appeal to counterfactual statements, presupposes a view of mathematical modality according to which even though mathematical entities do not exist, they might have existed But I have sought to defend this controversial view of mathematical modality from various objections derived from the fact that the existence or nonexistence of mathematical objects makes no difference to the arrangement of concrete objects This defense of the controversial view of mathematical modality obviously falls far short of a full endorsement of the counterfactual approach, but I hope my remarks may serve to help keep such an approach a live option

The Counterfactual Fallacy: The Effect of Counterfactual Thinking on Judgements of Responsibility

Abstract: This thesis was an investigation of the counterfactualfallacy, the tendency to confuse the perception that an event easily might not have been with the perception that an event ought not to have been. In a series of experiments subjects read a scenario in which actions leading to an accident were either highly mutable or less mutable, and either foreseeably or unforeseeably related to the accident. SubjectOs ratings of the actorOs responsibility for the accident were compared with predictions based on HeiderOs (1958) model of responsibility, Wells and GavanskiOs (1989) model of the effect of mutability on responsibility, and the counterfactual fallacy. The results generally supported the predictions derived from the counterfactual fallacy. In an additional series of experiments, subjects' perceptions of the mutability of the scenarios were assessed. The results from these experiments proved inconclusive.

Asymmetry and Overdetermination in Swain's Counterfactual Theory of Causation

Abstract: Hume's second definition of causation described effects as being counterfactually dependent upon their causes: one 'object' caused another "where, if the first object had not been, the second never had existed." This definition lay dormant for more than two centuries before it was revived and given its best known formulation by David Lewis. Several years ago, however, an alternative analysis of causation using counterfactuals was suggested by Marshall Swain. I wish to examine Swain's account critically as a potential alternative to Lewis's.