Abstract
Primary goal of this paper is to show that counterfactual reasoning, as many other kinds of common sense reasoning, can be studied and analyzed through what we can call a cognitive approach, that represents knowledge as structured and partitioned into different domains, everyone of which has a specific theory, but can exchange data and information with some of the others. Along these lines, we are going to show that a kind of “counterfactual attitude” is pervasive in a lot of forms of common sense reasoning, as in theories of action, beliefs/intentions ascription, cooperative and antagonistic situations, communication acts. The second purpose of the paper is to give a reading of counterfactual reasoning as a specific kind of contextual reasoning, this latter interpreted according to the theory of MultiContext Systems developed by Fausto Giunchiglia and his group.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
M. Benerecetti, P. Bouquet, and C. Ghidini. Contextual Reasoning Distilled. Journal of Theoretical and Experimental Artificial Intelligence, 12(3):279–305, 2000.
J. Bennett. Counterfactuals and temporal direction. The Philosophical Review, XCIII(1):57–91, January 1984.
R. Byrne and A. McEleny. Counterfactual thinking about actions. In P. Cherubini, editor, Human Reasoning: Logical and Psychological Perspectives. 1999.
T. Costello and J. McCarthy. Useful counterfactuals. Technical Report Vol. 3 (1999): nr 2, Linköping University, Articles in Computer and Information Science, 1999. http://ep.liu.se/ea/cis/1999/002/.
J. Dinsmore. Partitioned representations. Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991.
J. Dinsmore. Mental spaces from a functional perspective. Cognitive Science, 1987.
G. Fauconnier. Mental spaces: aspects of meaning construction in natural language. MIT Press, 1985.
G. Fauconnier. Analogical counterfactuals. In G. Fauconnier and E. Sweetser, editors, Spaces, Worlds, and Grammar, pages 1–28. The University of Chicago Press, 1996.
M. L. Ginsberg. Counterfactuals. Artificial Intelligence, 1986.
F. Giunchiglia. Contextual reasoning. Epistemologia, special issue on I Linguaggi e le Macchine, XVI:345–364, 1993.
F. Giunchiglia and P. Bouquet. Introduction to contextual reasoning. An Artificial Intelligence perspective. In B. Kokinov, editor, Perspectives on Cognitive Science, volume 3, pages 138–159. NBU Press, Sofia, 1997.
F. Giunchiglia and C. Ghidini. Local Models Semantics, or Contextual Reasoning = Locality + Compatibility. In Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (KR’98), pages 282–289, Trento, 1998. Morgan Kaufmann.
N. Goodman. The problem of counterfactual conditionals. In Conditionals.
J. Y. Halpern. Hypothetical knowledge and counterfactual reasoning. International Journal of Game Theory, 28, 1999.
S. J. Hoch. Counterfactual reasoning and accuracy in predicting personal events. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 11(4):719–731, 1985.
F. Jackson, editor. Conditionals. Oxford Readings in Philosophy. Oxford University Press, 1991.
C. Ortiz Jr. Explanatory update theory: Applications of counterfactual reasoning to causation. AI, 1999.
G. Lakoff. Sorry, I’m not myself today: The metaphor system for conceptualizing the self. In G. Fauconnier and E. Sweetser, editors, Spaces, Worlds, and Grammar, pages 1–28. The University of Chicago Press, 1996.
M. Lange. Inductive confirmation, counterfactual conditionals, and laws of nature. Philosophical Studies, 1997.
D. Lewis. Counterfactuals. Blackwell, 1973.
D. Lewis. Philosophical papers. Oxford University Press, 1983. Two volumes.
M. G. Lipe. Counterfactual reasoning as a framework for attribution theories. Psychological Bulletin, 109(3):456–471, 1991.
M. McDermott. Counterfactuals and Access Point. Mind, 1999.
P. Noordhof. Probabilistic Causation, Preemption and Counterfactuals. Mind, 1999.
R. Stalnaker. A Theory of Conditionals. In F. Jackson, editor, Conditionals, Oxford Readings in Philosophy, pages 28–45. Oxford University Press, 1991.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2001 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Ferrario, R. (2001). Counterfactual Reasoning. In: Akman, V., Bouquet, P., Thomason, R., Young, R. (eds) Modeling and Using Context. CONTEXT 2001. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 2116. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-44607-9_13
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-44607-9_13
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-42379-9
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-44607-1
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive