Counterfactual Reasoning Research Articles

Counterfactual Reasoning and Expropriation Compensation: An Argument for Elimination of Elimination Rules

AbstractTo award compensation for expropriated property, it is usually necessary to determine what the value of the property would have been if there had been no expropriation. This requires counterfactual thinking, a form of “make-believe” reasoning that legal professionals and valuators often find difficult to apply. The challenge becomes particularly difficult and important when the scheme underlying expropriation influences the value of the property that is taken. In such situations, rules developed in case law and legislation often attempt to clarify when aspects of property value should be attributed to the expropriation scheme and disregarded from further consideration. This article critically addresses elimination rules of this kind, arguing that they interfere with counterfactual assessments in ways that can render these assessments more difficult, less predictable, and more open to manipulation. To illustrate the overarching point, it is argued that recent proposals for reform in England and Wales, aiming to constrain the scope of contrary-to-fact elimination in expropriation cases, might not work as intended and could potentially make the situation worse. More broadly, the article argues that counterfactual reasoning in expropriation cases cannot be circumvented by legislative and casuistic interventions. Just as the law of tort, the law of expropriation compensation illustrates why counterfactual reasoning should be recognised as an irreducible and unique mode of legal reasoning, one that should be addressed as such by legal theorists and lawmakers alike.

The contribution of theory of mind, counterfactual reasoning, and executive function to pre-readers’ language comprehension and later reading awareness and comprehension in elementary school

The current longitudinal study examined the roles of theory of mind, counterfactual reasoning, and executive function in children’s pre-reading skills, reading awareness, and reading comprehension. It is the first to examine this set of variables with preschool and school-aged children. A sample of 31 children completed language comprehension, working memory, cognitive flexibility, first-order false belief, and counterfactual reasoning measures when they were 3 to 5years of age and completed second-order false belief, cognitive flexibility, reading comprehension, and reading awareness measures at 6 to 9years of age. Results indicated that false belief understanding contributed to phrase and sentence comprehension and reading awareness, whereas cognitive flexibility and counterfactual reasoning accounted for unique variance in reading comprehension. Implications of the results for the development of reading skill are discussed.

Nonlocality without counterfactual reasoning

Non-local correlations are usually understood through the outcomes of alternative measurements (on two or more parts of a system) that cannot altogether actually be carried out in an experiment. Indeed, a joint input/output -- e.g., measurement-setting/outcome -- behavior is non-local if and only if the outputs for all possible inputs cannot coexist consistently. It has been argued that this counterfactual view is how Bell's inequalities and their violations are to be seen. We propose an alternative perspective which refrains from setting into relation the results of mutually exclusive measurements, but that is based solely on data actually available. Our approach uses algorithmic complexity instead of probability, implies non-locality to have similar consequences as in the probabilistic view, and is conceptually simpler yet at the same time more general than the latter.

An improved probabilistic account of counterfactual reasoning.

When people want to identify the causes of an event, assign credit or blame, or learn from their mistakes, they often reflect on how things could have gone differently. In this kind of reasoning, one considers a counterfactual world in which some events are different from their real-world counterparts and considers what else would have changed. Researchers have recently proposed several probabilistic models that aim to capture how people do (or should) reason about counterfactuals. We present a new model and show that it accounts better for human inferences than several alternative models. Our model builds on the work of Pearl (2000), and extends his approach in a way that accommodates backtracking inferences and that acknowledges the difference between counterfactual interventions and counterfactual observations. We present 6 new experiments and analyze data from 4 experiments carried out by Rips (2010), and the results suggest that the new model provides an accurate account of both mean human judgments and the judgments of individuals. (PsycINFO Database Record

Children's Understanding of Behavioral Consequences of Epistemic States: A Comparison of Knowledge, Ignorance, and False Belief

ABSTRACTThe author addressed the issue of the simultaneity of false belief and knowledge understanding by investigating children's ability to predict the behavioral consequences of knowledge, ignorance, and false belief. The second aim of the study was to explore the role of counterfactuals in knowledge understanding. Ninety-nine (99) children, age 3–7 years old, completed the unexpected transfer task and a newly designed task in which a protagonist experienced 1 of the following 4 situations: knowing a fact, not knowing a fact, knowing a procedure, and not knowing a procedure. The results showed that factual ignorance was as difficult as false belief for the children, whereas the other conditions were all easier than false belief, suggesting that the well-known lag between ignorance and false belief may be partly methodologically based. The results provide support for a common underlying conceptual system for both knowing and believing, and evidence of the role of counterfactual reasoning in the development of epistemic state understanding. Methodological variations of the new task are proposed for future research.

Richard Kilvington and the Theory of Obligations

Kretzmann and Spade were led by Richard Kilvington’s proposed revisions to the rules of obligations in his discussion of the 47th sophism in his Sophismata to claim that the purpose of obligational disputations was the same as that of counterfactual reasoning. Angel d’Ors challenged this interpretation, realising that the reason for Kilvington’s revision was precisely that he found the art of obligation unsuited to the kind of reasoning that lay at the heart of the sophismatic argument. In his criticism, Kilvington focused on a technique used by Walter Burley to force a respondent to grant an arbitrary falsehood and similar to Lewis and Langford’s famous defence of ex impossibili quodlibet. Kilvington observed that just as in obligational disputation one may be obliged to grant a false proposition and deny a true one, so in counterfactual reasoning one may be obliged to doubt a proposition whose truth or falsity one knows, on pain of contradiction.

Relevance: a framework to address preconceptions that limit perceptions of what is relevant

Purpose– Erroneous perceptions of relevance contribute to business projects not being successful. Although the importance of relevance is recognized in the project management literature, thus far there has not been a formal framework for addressing erroneous perceptions of relevance. The purpose of this paper is to introduce a framework for identifying and counteracting erroneous perceptions of relevance.Design/methodology/approach– The research comprised review of the literature relating to factors that contribute to, and methods that counteract, erroneous perceptions of relevance.Findings– Contributory factors to erroneous perceptions of relevance include cultural cognition, path dependencies, lock-ins, fads, and hype. Mediating factors include priming and questioning, counterfactual reasoning, and optimal stopping.Research limitations/implications– A classification of erroneous perceptions of relevance is introduced Type III (inept positive) errors, Type II (false negative) errors, and Type I (false positive) errors. This terminology has the advantage of already being known to academics through statistical hypothesis testing, and to practitioners through process capability studies.Practical implications– The introduction of a framework for identifying and counteracting erroneous perceptions of relevance can better enable practitioners to make the selection of relevant concepts and technologies for projects – a capable process.Originality/value– The originality of this research note is that it provides a framework that can be applied to increase objectivity in perceptions of relevance. The value of this research note is that it introduces a framework for identifying and counteracting erroneous perceptions of relevance before the application of methods such as cost-benefit analysis.

Into the wild country: epistemic issues in professional guidelines for palliative sedation in end-of-life care

End-of-life care is an important object of governance. Using the linguistic notions of polysemy, metaphorical blending and counterfactual reasoning, this paper critically examines epistemic issues in professional guidelines for palliative sedation of the dying. As a last resort option, palliative sedation is described as the intentional, pharmacological reduction of the patient’s consciousness with the aim to reduce intolerable suffering from intractable physical symptoms that cannot be managed otherwise. Like a wilderness trail that simultaneously facilitates and constrains, the guidelines provide a set of ‘due care requirements’ that allows for the provision of end-of-life care in controversial territory.

A general framework for blaming in component-based systems

In component-based safety-critical embedded systems it is crucial to determine the cause(s) of the violation of a safety property, be it to issue a precise alert, to steer the system into a safe state, or to determine liability of component providers. In this paper we present an approach to blame components based on a single execution trace violating a safety property P. The diagnosis relies on counterfactual reasoning (“what would have been the outcome if component C had behaved correctly?”) to distinguish component failures that actually contributed to the outcome from failures that had little or no impact on the violation of P.

What If? The Historian and the Counterfactual

This essay lays out why many scholars, particularly historians, are inherently skeptical of counterfactuals. It highlights several of the most obvious errors that are often made by those undertaking counterfactual reasoning. It also highlights how these articles go a long way toward developing effective rules for the appropriate and most effective use of counterfactuals.

Reinforcement learning and counterfactual reasoning explain adaptive behavior in a changing environment.

Animals routinely adapt to changes in the environment in order to survive. Though reinforcement learning may play a role in such adaptation, it is not clear that it is the only mechanism involved, as it is not well suited to producing rapid, relatively immediate changes in strategies in response to environmental changes. This research proposes that counterfactual reasoning might be an additional mechanism that facilitates change detection. An experiment is conducted in which a task state changes over time and the participants had to detect the changes in order to perform well and gain monetary rewards. A cognitive model is constructed that incorporates reinforcement learning with counterfactual reasoning to help quickly adjust the utility of task strategies in response to changes. The results show that the model can accurately explain human data and that counterfactual reasoning is key to reproducing the various effects observed in this change detection paradigm.

Factual and counterfactual action-outcome mappings control choice between goal-directed actions in rats

The capacity to extract causal knowledge from the environment allows us to predict future events and to use those predictions to decide on a course of action. Although evidence of such causal reasoning has long been described, recent evidence suggests that using predictive knowledge to guide decision-making in this way is predicated on reasoning about causes in two quite distinct ways: choosing an action can be based on the interaction between predictive information and the consequences of that action, or, alternatively, actions can be selected based on the consequences that they do not produce. The latter counterfactual reasoning is highly adaptive because it allows us to use information about both present and absent events to guide decision-making. Nevertheless, although there is now evidence to suggest that animals other than humans, including rats and birds, can engage in causal reasoning of one kind or another, there is currently no evidence that they use counterfactual reasoning to guide choice. To assess this question, we gave rats the opportunity to learn new action-outcome relationships, after which we probed the structure of this learning by presenting excitatory and inhibitory cues predicting that the specific outcomes of their actions would either occur or would not occur. Whereas the excitors biased choice toward the action delivering the predicted outcome, the inhibitory cues selectively elevated actions predicting the absence of the inhibited outcome, suggesting that rats encoded the counterfactual action-outcome mappings and were able to use them to guide choice.

Counterfactual reasoning for regretted situations involving controllable versus uncontrollable events: the modulating role of contingent self-esteem.

We report a study that examined the modulating impact of contingent self-esteem on regret intensity for regretted outcomes associated with controllable versus uncontrollable events. The Contingent Self-Esteem Scale (e.g., Kernis & Goldman, 2006) was used to assess the extent to which a person’s sense of self-worth is based on self and others’ expectations. We found that there was an influence of self-esteem contingency for controllable but not for uncontrollable regret types. For controllable regret types individuals with a high contingent (i.e., unstable) self-esteem reported greater regret intensity than those with a low contingent (i.e., stable) self-esteem. We interpret this finding as reflecting a functional and adaptive role of high contingent self-esteem in terms of mobilizing the application of counterfactual reasoning and planning mechanisms that can enable personal expectations to be achieved in the future.

Thought Experiments in Historiographic Function: Max Weber on Eduard Meyer and the Question of Counterfactuality

Thought Experiments in Historiographic Function: Max Weber on Eduard Meyer and the Question of Counterfactuality. Max Weber's remarks on his colleague Eduard Meyer regarding counterfactual reasoning in history reflects a significant shift during the Methodenstreit around 1900. The question of attributing historical change strictly to either individual causes or abstract general laws has been tackled in a new way: By counterfactual reasoning a historian should be able to detect the most significant (and therefore meaningful) cause, event, or action for a certain historical outcome. Following Fritz Ringer, this paper argues that given the predominating methods of the natural sciences, scholars of the humanities conducted historical research by counterfactual thought experiments. This way, Weber pried open contemporary narratives (e.g. historicism), and by employing a unique historical causal analysis he made way for refined concepts to offer a model of interpretation that gave hope for a more feasible, practice-oriented approach to historical research than the epistemological discussions had hitherto offered.

Leveraging fairness and reactance theories to deter reactive computer abuse following enhanced organisational information security policies: an empirical study of the influence of counterfactual reasoning and organisational trust

AbstractResearch shows that organisational efforts to protect their information assets from employee security threats do not always reach their full potential and may actually encourage the behaviours they attempt to thwart, such as reactive computer abuse (CA). To better understand this dilemma, we use fairness theory (FT) and reactance theory (RT) to explain why employees may blame organisations for and retaliate against enhanced information security policies (ISPs). We tested our model with 553 working professionals and found support for most of it. Our results show that organisational trust can decrease reactive CA. FT suggests that explanation adequacy (EA) is an important factor that builds trust after an event. Our results also suggest that trust both fully mediates the relationship between EA and CA and partially mediates the relationship between perceived freedom restrictions related to enhanced ISPs and reactive CA. EA also had a strong negative relationship with freedom restrictions. Moreover, organisational security education, training and awareness (SETA) initiatives decreased the perceptions of external control and freedom restrictions and increased EA, and advance notification of changes increased EA. We also included 14 control variables and rival explanations to determine with more confidence what drove reactive CA in our context. Notably, the deterrence theory (DT)‐based constructs of sanction severity, certainty and celerity had no significant influence on reactive CA. We provide support for the importance of respectful communication efforts and SETA programmes, coupled with maximising employee rights and promoting trust and fairness to decrease reactive CA. These efforts can protect organisations from falling victim to their own organisational security efforts.

Causal superseding

When agents violate norms, they are typically judged to be more of a cause of resulting outcomes. In this paper, we suggest that norm violations also affect the causality attributed to other agents, a phenomenon we refer to as “causal superseding.” We propose and test a counterfactual reasoning model of this phenomenon in four experiments. Experiments 1 and 2 provide an initial demonstration of the causal superseding effect and distinguish it from previously studied effects. Experiment 3 shows that this causal superseding effect is dependent on a particular event structure, following a prediction of our counterfactual model. Experiment 4 demonstrates that causal superseding can occur with violations of non-moral norms. We propose a model of the superseding effect based on the idea of counterfactual sufficiency.

Pretend play.

Pretend play is a form of playful behavior that involves nonliteral action. Although on the surface this activity appears to be merely for fun, recent research has discovered that children's pretend play has connections to important cognitive and social skills, such as symbolic thinking, theory of mind, and counterfactual reasoning. The current article first defines pretend play and then reviews the arguments and evidence for these three connections. Pretend play has a nonliteral correspondence to reality, hence pretending may provide children with practice with navigating symbolic relationships, which may strengthen their language skills. Pretend play and theory of mind reasoning share a focus on others' mental states in order to correctly interpret their behavior, hence pretending and theory of mind may be mutually supportive in development. Pretend play and counterfactual reasoning both involve representing nonreal states of affairs, hence pretending may facilitate children's counterfactual abilities. These connections make pretend play an important phenomenon in cognitive science: Studying children's pretend play can provide insight into these other abilities and their developmental trajectories, and thereby into human cognitive architecture and its development.

Determinants and disparities: A simulation approach to the case of child health care

Though there is much agreement on the importance of the social determinants of health, debate continues on suitable empirically-based models to underpin efforts to tackle health and health care disparities. We demonstrate an approach that uses a dynamic micro-simulation model of the early life course, based on longitudinal data from a New Zealand cohort of children born in 1977, and counterfactual reasoning applied to a range of outcomes. The focus is on health service use with a comparison to outcomes in non-health domains, namely educational attainment and antisocial behaviour. We show an application of the model to test scenarios based on modifying key determinants and assessing the impact on putative outcomes. We found that appreciable improvement was only effected by modifying multiple determinants; structural determinants were relatively more important than intermediary ones as potential policy levers; there was a social gradient of effect; and interventions bestowed the greatest benefit to the most disadvantaged groups with a corresponding reduction in disparities between the worst-off and the best-off. Our findings provide evidence on how public policy initiatives might be more effective acting broadly across sectors and across social groups, and thus make a real difference to the most disadvantaged.

Imagination and the generation of new ideas

A variety of theories have been put forth to explain the function of imagination, most notably that imagination engages and develops children's theory of mind and counterfactual reasoning. Here, we propose that a primary role for imagination is as a cognitive mechanism for efficiently generating new ideas without observing new evidence. Learners must generate hypotheses before they can assess the truth of these hypotheses. Given infinite possibilities, how do learners constrain the process of hypothesis generation? We suggest that learners represent abstract criteria for the solution to a problem and generate solutions that, if true, would solve the problem. As a preliminary test of this idea, we show that, in the absence of any fact of the matter (i.e., when neither prior knowledge nor statistical data distinguishes competing hypotheses), 4–6-year-olds (mean: 63 months) systematically converge on solutions to problems, consistent with an ability to imagine the abstract properties of causal problems and their solutions.

Sit Verum Obligationes and Counterfactual Reasoning

In the early 1980s, Paul V. Spade advanced the thesis that obligational reasoning was counterfactual reasoning, based upon his interpretation of the obligationes of Walter Burley, Richard Kilvington, and Roger Swyneshed. Eleonore Stump in a series of contemporary papers argued against Spade’s thesis with respect to Burley and Swyneshed, provisionally admitting it for Kilvington with the caveat that Kilvington’s theory is by no means clear or non-idiosyncratic. In this paper, we revisit the connection between counterfactual reasoning and obligationes, focusing on one particular treatise, the anonymous early twelfth-century Obligationes Parisienses edited by L.M. de Rijk in the late 70s. We show that while positio in this treatise does not involve counterfactual reasoning, the species sit verum or rei veritas apparently does, and it is precisely this which distinguishes the two species in this treatise.