Counterfactual Hypotheses Research Articles

Does Ecological Planting–Breeding Mix Pattern Improve Farmers’ Subjective Well-Being? Evidence from the Middle and Lower Reaches of the Yangtze River

The Chinese government is making vigorous efforts to control agricultural pollution. The promotion of an ecological planting–breeding mix pattern is one of them. Farmers’ mode of production will affect their subjective well-being. Thus, this paper aims to analyze the impact of adopting the ecological planting–breeding mix pattern on farmers’ subjective well-being based on 895 pieces of survey data from the provinces of Hubei, Hunan, and Jiangxi in the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River. Using the endogenous switching regression model, we find that the adoption of the ecological planting–breeding mix pattern has a significant positive effect on farmers’ subjective well-being. Based on this counterfactual hypothesis, if the farmers who actually adopted the ecological planting–breeding mix pattern did not adopt it, their subjective well-being would decrease from 4.006 to 3.669. Further examination indicates that self-worth identification, income increase, and neighborhood communication could be potential mechanisms. Additionally, the effect of the ecological planting–breeding mix pattern on subjective well-being is stronger in the group with low financial support. The technical support provided by the government does not have a significant regulatory effect on the adoption of the ecological planting–breeding mix pattern on subjective well-being. Our results suggest that farmers’ ecological production behavior can affect their subjective well-being. This may be relevant to many developing countries today that are attempting to adopt ecological agriculture patterns.

Assessing the inhibitory effect and intervention mechanism of food traceability system on reducing hog farmers’ overuse of animal antibiotics in China

The use of animal antibiotics is a double-edged sword. It can be used for disease treatment, health protection, and growth promoters. It also creates antibiotic residues and resistance, poses risks, and damages food safety, ecosystems, and public health. Under the pressure of disease risk and expected losses, farmers' overuse of animal antibiotics exacerbates this dual objective incompatibility. In this study, we employ the endogenous switching regression (ESR) model and the mediating effect method to empirically analyze the inhibitory effect and intervention mechanism of the food traceability system (FTS) on reducing farmers’ overuse of antibiotics by using the survey data of hog farmers from China. This paper measures the “dose” unit of antibiotics farmers use regarding cost and the active ingredients of antibiotics per kilogram of treated infected hogs. The study finds evidence that the FTS exerts a significant inhibitory effect on the overuse of antibiotics by farmers. The counterfactual hypothesis unveils that non-participation in the FTS by the involved farmers will increase the cost of antibiotics overuse by 0.080 yuan/kg, while if the farmers currently not participating are to engage with the FTS, the price will decrease by 0.126 yuan/kg. This effect persists across control variables controlled in turn and the unit doses of active ingredients of tetracycline, sulfonamides, β-lactam, chloramphenicol, and macrolide antibiotics. Moreover, our results reveal thatthe inhibitory effects of the FTS on over-the-counter and broad-spectrum antibiotics are more significant than on prescription and narrow-spectrum antibiotics. The results show that the inhibition effect of the FTS on the overuse of antibiotics by free-range, professional, and large-scale farmers exhibits an approximately inverse-U curvilinear relationship. Besides, the intervention mechanism of the FTS on the overuse of antibiotics by farmers mainly consists of social reputation maintenance, liability traceability for antibiotic residues, and biosafety enhancement, and the proportion of their mediating effects in the total impact are 24.22%, 21.84%, and 10.87%, respectively. Our empirical study has yielded several implications, such as strengthening the FTS construction, improving farmers’ antibiotic use skills, promoting standardized breeding levels, and increasing the market premium for food products that adhere to antibiotic residue standards. These outcomes not only contribute to the improvement of livestock production safety but also reduce the problem of antibiotic overuse.

Research on the impact of internet use on fertilizer and pesticide inputs: Empirical evidence from China

Fertilizers and pesticides are important agricultural production materials. Excessive use of fertilizers and pesticides can cause negative impacts such as decline in the quality of farm products and damage to the ecological environment. Increasing the efficiency of fertilizers and pesticides is an important step to accelerate the green transformation of agriculture. Using data from the 2015 China Household Finance Survey, this paper analyzes the impacts of Internet use on fertilizers and pesticides by farmers, and the mechanism behind the action with the help of the propensity score matching method and the instrumental variable method. The findings are: (1) Farmers who use the Internet have greater inputs of fertilizers and pesticides compared to farmers who do not use the Internet. (2) Farmers who do not use the Internet would have their inputs of fertilizers and pesticides increased by 21.9% and 47.7%, respectively, if they had used the Internet under the counterfactual hypothesis. (3) In the heterogeneity analysis, Internet use plays a positive and significant role in the inputs of fertilizer and pesticide in the eastern part of China, and Internet use has greater impact on pesticide inputs than on fertilizer in central and western regions. (4) Internet use has a positive and significant effect on fertilizer and pesticide inputs in both lower scale and higher scale operations, and a positive but not significant effect in moderate-scale operations.

Logical Satisfiability of Counterfactuals for Faithful Explanations in NLI

Evaluating an explanation's faithfulness is desired for many reasons such as trust, interpretability and diagnosing the sources of model's errors. In this work, which focuses on the NLI task, we introduce the methodology of Faithfulness-through-Counterfactuals, which first generates a counterfactual hypothesis based on the logical predicates expressed in the explanation, and then evaluates if the model's prediction on the counterfactual is consistent with that expressed logic (i.e. if the new formula is \textit{logically satisfiable}). In contrast to existing approaches, this does not require any explanations for training a separate verification model. We first validate the efficacy of automatic counterfactual hypothesis generation, leveraging on the few-shot priming paradigm. Next, we show that our proposed metric distinguishes between human-model agreement and disagreement on new counterfactual input. In addition, we conduct a sensitivity analysis to validate that our metric is sensitive to unfaithful explanations.

Rawls’s Political Liberalism from an Emergentist Perspective

John Rawls’s political liberalism is supported and better understood via Michael Polanyi’s tacit and emergent structures. Rawls claims the political is “freestanding” and “neutral” relative to comprehensive moral doctrines and metaphysical assumptions. Polanyian critics of Rawls empha­size the personal nature of our political commitments and Polanyi’s metaphysical realism. They also claim tacit knowing makes Rawls’s “veil of ignorance” impossible. However, as an emergent social order, political liberalism is a joint comprehension of a plurality of competing traditions that operates as an upper-level control in a dual control system; it supports yet constrains individuals in traditions so they may mutually flourish under its umbrella. Emergent levels have their own rules of organization and hence possess a rationality that can function independently and neutrally relative to its subsidiaries and so is freestanding, as Rawls claims. Still, since this level is constituted by overlapping consensus and is not a modus vivendi, there is indeed personal commitment to political values, as Polanyi affirms. This continuity makes it difficult to disambiguate one’s comprehensive ethical understanding from one’s political understanding. But, as with counterfactual hypotheses in science, Polanyi could endorse the artifice of the veil. By occluding politically irrelevant facts we better access this shared level, and tacit convictions about political justice become explicit.

Research on the Income Growth Effect of Farmers' Participation in E-commerce in Poor Areas

With the continuous development of e-commerce in China's rural areas, whether e-commerce can increase farmers' income has been paid more and more attention. Based on the field investigation of farmer households in two counties of Guangxi, this paper analyzes the correlation between farmers' participation in e-commerce decisions and the income level of farmers' families, and uses the endogenous transformation model to make an empirical analysis of the income level gap between farmers' participation in e-commerce and farmers' non-participation in e-commerce samples. The results show that the income level of farmers who participate in e-commerce of agricultural products is significantly higher than that of farmers who do not participate in e-commerce. The counterfactual hypothesis analysis results show that the adoption of e-commerce may significantly increase farmers' total household income by 10.3% and planting income by 11.3%. The adoption of e-commerce will widen the income gap among farmers. Under the assumption of rational smallholder farmers, this gap is the income increase effect of the adoption of e-commerce.

The relationship between theory of mind and peer acceptance in preschool children: a test of the counterfactual hypothesis in the social domain

ABSTRACT Scientific literature indicates that theory of mind (ToM) is less strongly associated with peer acceptance (PA) in the case of boys and the case of negative nominations. This study hypothesizes that these two effects of ToM on PA could be an epiphenomenon of counterfactual reasoning (CFR). Fifty-three 3-5-year-olds participated in this study. The results confirmed the hypothesis. When the total sample nominated, ToM made a significant contribution to explaining positive nominations, but not negative nominations, beyond age, language, gender and CFR. When separately considering the gender of the nominators, ToM accounted for a significant variance in positive nominations only when girls, but not boys, nominated. Furthermore, CFR was a significant predictor of social rejection beyond age, language and gender when the total sample nominated, as well as when each gender nominated separately. This study could contribute to a better understanding of the socio-cognitive genesis of PA. Practical implications are discussed.

Effects of multiple cropping of farmland on the welfare level of farmers: Based on the perspective of poverty vulnerability

This paper aims to explore the impact of multiple cropping on farmers’ welfare level and provide the theoretical and empirical basis for solving relative poverty in rural areas in the future. The paper uses data from the field survey of 1,120 farmers in Hubei in 2018 and uses the Endogenous Transformation Regression Model (ESR) and generalized propensity score matching (GPSM) model to construct a counterfactual framework. The paper analyses the effect of multiple cropping on farmers’ relative poverty and examines its mechanism. The result shows that: Multiple cropping of farmland can reduce the relative poverty of farmers through the mechanism of yield improvement path and factor intensification path. Under the counterfactual hypothesis, the relative poverty of farmers would increase by 28.43% if the farmers who participated in the multiple cropping did not; and that the relative poverty of the farmers would decrease by 29.57% if the farmers who did not participate in the multiple cropping participated. From the perspective of multiple cropping, the poverty reduction effect of multiple cropping in paddy fields is higher than that of dry land. From the perspective of the degree of multiple cropping, the poverty reduction effects of paddy fields and dryland will experience an increasing return to scale as the multiple cropping index increases. When the household equivalent scale adjustment coefficient is not used to eliminate the impact of family population structure on the “family per capita comparable income,” the artificially high results estimated by the model cannot truly reflect the poverty-reducing effect of multi-cropping of farmland. This paper argues that the government can guide farmers to choose the suitable mode of multiple cropping to reduce farmers’ vulnerability to relative poverty.

A novel probabilistic approach to counterfactual reasoning in system safety

Safety–critical systems cannot afford to wait for data from multiple high-consequence events to become available in order to inform safety recommendations. Counterfactual reasoning has been widely used in system safety to address this issue, enabling the incorporation of evidence from single events with an analyst’s current knowledge of a system to learn from past events. However, current counterfactual methods have been criticized for making analysts prone to linearizing and oversimplifying complex events. In order to overcome these limitations, this work establishes a novel probabilistic approach to counterfactual reasoning called “possible worlds” counterfactuals. This methodology enables the integration of an analyst’s causal knowledge about a system (in the form of a Bayesian network-based risk assessment model) with the best available evidence about an event of interest (e.g., an accident). As a result, counterfactual hypotheses, commonly used in the practice of system safety, can now be rigorously assessed through causally-sound probabilistic methods. We demonstrate the capabilities of “possible worlds” counterfactuals with a real-world case study on the 2018 Sun Prairie gas explosion and show how this approach can provide additional lessons and insights beyond those provided by authorities at the time of the event.

Counterfactual cognition and psychosis: adding complexity to predictive processing accounts

ABSTRACT Over the last decade or so, several researchers have considered the predictive processing framework (PPF) to be a useful perspective from which to shed some much-needed light on the mechanisms behind psychosis. Most approaches to psychosis within PPF come down to the idea of the “atypical” brain generating inaccurate hypotheses that the “typical” brain does not generate, either due to a systematic top-down processing bias or more general precision weighting breakdown. Strong at explaining common individual symptoms of psychosis, such approaches face some issues when we look at a more general clinical picture. In this paper, we propose an update on the current accounts of psychosis based on the realization that a neurotypical brain constantly generates non-actual, de-coupled, counterfactual hypotheses as part of healthy cognition. We suggest that what is going on in psychosis, at least in some cases, is not so much a generation of erroneous hypotheses, but rather an inability to correctly use the counterfactual ones. This updated view casts “accurate” cognition as more fragile and delicate, but also closes the gap between psychosis and typical cognition.

The Good Life and Climate Adaptation

The need to adapt to climate change brings about moral concerns that according to ‘eco-centric’ critiques cannot be resolved by modernist ethics, as this takes humans as the only beings capable of intentionality and rationality. However, if intentionality and rationality are reconsidered as ‘counterfactual hypotheses’ it becomes possible to align modernist ethics with the eco-centric approaches. These counterfactual hypotheses guide the development of institutions, so as to allow the pursuit of a ‘good life’. This mean that society should be organized as if humans are intentional and, following Habermas’s idea of ‘communicative rationality’, as if humans are capable of collective deliberation. Given the ecological challenges, the question becomes how to give ecological concerns a voice in deliberative processes.

Historical Discourse and Narrativity

AbstractMost theorists of history now seem to regard narrative as the only discursive model on which historians rely to make sense of the past. The structure of many works in current historiographic production, however, is not that of a narrative as defined in literary theory. The histories of World War II discussed here, for example, do not all tell a story; several of them take the form of synchronic analyses bearing on some aspects of the conflict. Furthermore, those histories of the war that tell a story follow different models and have widely divergent degrees of narrativity. That is, they resort at various levels of frequency and deliberateness to strategies that narratologists such as Meir Sternberg and Raphaël Baroni view as typical of storytelling. Positing readers who know how the war ended (the Allies won), they do not turn to suspense but seek to arouse curiosity by making counterfactual hypotheses (What if?) that offer alternatives to what actually happened. Furthermore, they attempt to create surprise by proposing “new versions” grounded in recently uncovered evidence and/or thus far unasked questions. As Dorrit Cohn speaks of the “distinction of fiction,” it would thus be legitimate to speak in these areas of the “distinction of historiography.” Indeed, the classical nineteenth-century extra-heterodiegetic narratives to which histories are frequently compared are unlikely to include counterfactuals, as they are unlikely to offer new, “better” versions of the events that they report.

Pluralizing Darwin: Making Counter-Factual History of Science Significant

In the wake of recent attempts at alternate history (Bowler 2013), this paper suggests several avenues for a pluralistic approach to Charles Darwin and his role in the history of evolutionary theory. We examine in what sense Darwin could be described as a major driver of theoretical change in the history of biology. First, this paper examines how Darwin influenced the future of biological science: not merely by stating the fact of evolution or by bringing evidence for it; but by discovering natural selection, and giving it pre-eminence over any other mechanism for evolution; and also by proposing a masterful and quite unique synthesis of many scientific fields. Contrasting Darwin’s views with those of A.R. Wallace, I conclude that “natural selection” is clearly an original contribution, that it had no forerunners or co-discoverers, and could barely have appeared after Darwin conceived of it. This specificity of Darwin’s contribution is an invitation to be strongly presentist (Loison 2016) and to adopt only weak counter-factuals. In contrast, there are possible ways to use strong counter-factuals as attempts to “pluralize” the history of biological theory: i.e. imagine new possible avenues for the development of evolutionary biology. The idea that evolution was a theory “in the air” suggests that evolutionary theory could have developed in a world without Darwin, especially if we accept to delete not only “Darwin” but “England”. France and Germany are examined as possible countries where evolutionary ideas would have thrived even with no contribution from the English scientists. Finally, the paper suggests another counter-factual hypothesis: deleting not Darwin and his Origin but the Darwin Industry itself. This may allow us to read the Origin of Species with fresh eyes and to discover Darwin’s life-long interest in variation and its laws, as many of his early readers did.

The effects of farmers’ adoption behavior of soil and water conservation measures on agricultural output

Purpose This paper aims to build a theoretical model of the impact of farmers’ adoption behavior of soil and water conservation measures on the agricultural output to analyze the impact of farmers’ adoption behavior of soil and water conservation measures on agricultural output. Design/methodology/approach Based on the field survey data of 808 farmers households in three provinces (regions) of the Loess Plateau, this paper using the endogenous switching regression model to analyze the effect of farmers’ adoption behavior of soil and water conservation measures on agricultural output. Findings Soil erosion has a significant negative impact on agricultural output, and soil erosion has a significant positive impact on farmers’ adoption of soil and water conservation measures. Farmers adopt soil and water conservation measures such as engineering measures, biological measures and tillage measures to cope with soil erosion, which can increase agricultural output. Based on the counterfactual hypothesis, if farmers who adopt soil and water conservation measures do not adopt the corresponding soil and water conservation measures, their average output per ha output will decrease by 2.01%. Then, if farmers who do not adopt soil and water conservation measures adopt the corresponding soil and water conservation measures, their average output per ha output will increase by 12.12%. Government support and cultivated land area have a significant positive impact on farmers’ adoption behavior of soil and water conservation measures. Research limitations/implications The research limitation is the lack of panel data. Practical implications Soil erosion has a significant negative impact on agricultural output, and soil erosion has a significant positive impact on farmers’ adoption of soil and water conservation measures. Farmers adopt soil and water conservation measures such as engineering measures, biological measures and tillage measures to cope with soil erosion, which can increase agricultural output. Social implications The conclusion provides a reliable empirical basis for the government to formulate and implement relevant policies. Originality/value The contributions of this paper are as follows: the adoption behavior of soil and water conservation measures and agricultural output are included into the same analytical framework for empirical analysis, revealing the influencing factors of farmers’ adoption behavior of soil and water conservation measures and their output effects, enriching existing research. Using endogenous switching regression model and introducing instrumental variables to overcome the endogenous problem between the adoption behavior of soil and water conservation measures and agricultural output, and to analyze the influencing factors of farmers’ adoption behavior of soil and water conservation measures and its impact on agricultural output. Using the counter-factual idea to ensure that the two matched individuals have the same or similar attributes, to evaluate the average treatment effect of the behavior of soil and water conservation measures, to estimate the real impact of adaptation measures on agricultural output as accurately as possible and to avoid misleading policy recommendations.

Ucronia e falsificazione della storia: il caso di The Man in the High Castle

The Man in the High Castle is an uchrony, which is also a metaliteral novel on the power of literature, full of perspective games, anamorphoses and reflections about reality, in which Philip K. Dick, after the World War Two, imagines a world dominated by the power of the Axis. The novel is based on the counterfactual hypothesis “What would have happened if Hitler had won the war?”.

APPLYING TWO-SIDED MARKETS THEORY: THE MASTERCARD AND AMERICAN EXPRESS DECISIONS

Since the seminal papers by Rochet and Tirole, the payment card industry has represented an elected field of study for the economic features of multi-sided markets and their effects on both regulation and antitrust analysis. The recent judgments of the UK High Court of Justice in MasterCard and of the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in American Express are particularly relevant since they are the first to concretely apply the economic theory of multi-sided markets to the payment card industry. In particular, given the peculiarities of multi-sided markets, the coexistence of different business models, and the twofold competitive interpretation of the conduct once studied in its own context, courts have emphasised the need to articulate a judgment around counterfactual hypotheses. This is a way to measure the actual impact on competition, testing the realistic scenario that would occur if the investigated conduct was absent, so as to give appropriate consideration to the business model of the single platform, in which competition law should intervene. The same reasoning that makes us consider advantageous a flexible antitrust approach (meaning a case-by-case analysis) forces us to be critical of the current US and EU regulation of payment systems.

Applying Two-Sided Markets Theory: The MasterCard and American Express Decisions

Since the seminal papers by Rochet and Tirole, the payment card industry has represented an elected field of study for the economic features of multi-sided markets and their effects on both regulation and antitrust analysis. The recent judgments of the UK High Court of Justice in MasterCard and of the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in American Express are particularly relevant since they are the first to concretely apply the economic theory of multi-sided markets to the payment card industry. In particular, given the peculiarities of multi-sided markets, the coexistence of different business models, and the twofold competitive interpretation of the conduct once studied in its own context, courts have emphasised the need to articulate a judgment around counterfactual hypotheses. This is a way to measure the actual impact on competition, testing the realistic scenario that would occur if the investigated conduct was absent, so as to give appropriate consideration to the business model of the single platform, in which competition law should intervene. The same reasoning that makes us consider advantageous a flexible antitrust approach (meaning a case-by-case analysis) forces us to be critical of the current US and EU regulation of payment systems.

権力論における「反実仮想」の妥当性について

権力論における「反実仮想」の妥当性について

A few counter-factual hypotheses on the current economic crisis

The economic and financial problems of the present devastating crisis are terribly practical. Sraffa's little book is highly theoretical. To relate the two we must avoid stopping at Keynes, and include the whole group of economists around him in Cambridge, resuming the discussions that have been pushed into oblivion by the mainstream. The capital theory controversy was not the only one. Here, more relevant is the controversy on growth, income distribution, savings and profits between Samuelson--Modigliani and Kaldor--Pasinetti. As a result, a theorem, associated with Modigliani--Miller, was brought to fame and hailed as 'the core of modern corporate finance'. Its surprisingly wide acceptance is here harshly criticised and indicted of major responsibility for the present crisis. Inevitably, this is argued through counter-factual hypotheses. Yet, even with less sophisticated analytical tools, a framework does exist, much nearer to common sense, implying the needed flexibility and openness of mind for the major restructuring of financial institutions, which today so clearly emerges as the major task to undertake. Copyright , Oxford University Press.

Meaning Production, Modelling Mental Architecture and Blending

In this article, the models of mental spaces and blending proposed by Turner & Fauconnier are revisited in a cognitive-semiotic framework, which anchors all space networks in semiotic base spaces of mental and communicative activity. This move (sometimes termed the Aarhus model) makes it possible to establish a connection to a phenomenologically based modelling of mental architecture for apperception and action planning, and thus to regain a certain scientific realism. Five cases of blending are briefly reviewed: counterfactual conditionality, XYZ, metaphor, hypothesis, and agency.