Counterfactuals

La relación causal está presente en el modo en que comprendemos los procesos de nuestro entorno, la forma en que creemos que se desarrollarán los hechos en el futuro y la manera en que justificamos nuestras acciones. Parte de la comprensión de lo ocurrido proviene de señalar las condiciones que hacen que cierto hecho tenga lugar, a qué se debió que un episodio haya ocurrido o a qué se debe que no haya tenido lugar. Parte de la información relevante para este conocimiento proviene de las teorías científicas vigentes, por lo cual, todo cambio de teoría puede redundar en una revisión del papel que cada factor juega en causar, facilitar, retardar o impedir cierto efecto. Por otra parte, no todas las relaciones causales son deterministas, de modo que el análisis de cuáles son las probabilidades de ocurrencia de un efecto luego de que tuvieron lugar sus causas abre la puerta a una relación de causa-efecto aun cuando no siempre una causa garantice la ocurrencia del efecto. El problema filosófico de comprender en qué consiste la relación causal es una de las preguntas clásicas de la metafísica que puede, a su vez, revitalizarse una y otra vez al tomar una perspectiva filosófica que contemple los contenidos y cambios de las teorías científicas. Es así que las discusiones sobre la flecha del tiempo, la termodinámica, las leyes físicas y los fenómenos que las nuevas teorías abordan, son una fuente abundante de novedades para la discusión renovada sobre la relación causal.

What is it for an event not to occur? This is an urgent, yet under explored, question
for counterfactual analyses of causation quite generally. In this paper I take a lead
from Lewis in identifying two different possible standards of non-occurrence that we
might adopt and I argue that we need to apply them asymmetrically: one standard
for the cause, another for the effect. This is a surprising result. I then offer a
contextualist refinement of the Lewis approach in light of initial problems, and
discuss how the asymmetry remained hidden until now. I then relate the non-
occurrence problem to issues of transitivity and proportionality in causation, before
showing that a parallel problem exists for contrastivist and interventionist
approaches to causation too.

People often reason about states of the world that could have been, but which are not, or those which could be, given that certain conditions are satisfied. When we make statements about such relationships, we usually divide them into two parts: the condition (protasis) and the result (the apodosis). While most languages signal the relationship between protasis and apodosis in counterfactual conditional constructions explicitly, they vary widely in the structures they use to do so. The present study addresses several questions related to cross-linguistic variation in this domain. How are the clauses marked for tense, aspect, and modality? What kind of clause-linking strategies are used to combine them? Are the clauses marked using the same or different morphosyntax? Through qualitative and quantitative analysis of a large sample of carefully selected languages, we demonstrate widespread differences between languages. We also uncover general patterns of features that correlate both with the symmetry and the morphosyntax of protases and apodoses in counterfactual conditionals across languages.

There is a profound, but frequently ignored relationship between logical consequence (formal implication) and material implication. The first repeats the patterns of the latter, but with a wider modal reach. It is argued that this kinship between formal and material implication simply means that they express the same kind of implication, but differ in scope. Formal implication is unrestricted material implication. This apparently innocuous observation has some significant corollaries: (1) conditionals are not connectives, but arguments; (2) the traditional examples of valid argumentative forms are metalogical principles that express the properties of logical consequence; (3) formal logic is not a useful guide to detect valid arguments in the real world; (4) it is incoherent to propose alternatives to the material implication while accepting the classical properties of formal implication; (5) some of the counter-examples to classical argumentative forms and known conditional puzzles are unsound.

Counterfactual history involves asking 'what if' developments had occurred differently and comparing that with what actually happened. Though common in works of popular history and science fiction, counterfactual history remains controversial within the academic discipline of history. It is often dismissed as a mere parlour game or as a work of science fiction rather than of history while other historians have seen it as a necessary corrective to historical accounts because it stresses contingency and helps to question causation and the benefit of highlight. Drawing upon this debate, this paper examines what counterfactual history is and the debates around it. It distils eight main rules of counterfactual historical analysis. It then explores how lawyers use counterfactual analysis and the advantages and disadvantages of using counterfactual history in a legal context. The paper introduces and explores a new concept: Counterfactual Legal History, to see how asking 'what if' question can shed light upon how law actually developed and how it could develop. It shows that by asking what could have been, Counterfactual Legal History highlights not only other possible futures (underlining the contingency of law) but it also emphasizes the importance of agency (showing that other futures are possible and can be achieved). A counterfactual approach provides an assault on a deterministic interpretation of law as being fixed. It provides an opportunity to question and indeed depart from the progress narrative of evolutionary functionalist accounts as identified by Robert Gordon.

"Miller is charming company, both humanly and intellectually. He is onto something-the theme of unled lives, and the fascinating idea that fiction intensifies the sense of provisionality that attends all lives. An extremely attractive book."-James Wood "A one-of-a-kind book that is at once literary and personal, drawing the reader into a world of reflection about the nature of the lives we have not lived. Why do we return to the past in order to understand who we are now? This is a profound question, and this book explores its possible answers more acutely, more humanly, than anything I have seen on the subject."

In this essay I use theories of counterfactual history and cinematic affect to argue that, while we often think of narrative cinema as being purely fictional, in some senses it might not be. I argue that cinema may function as something of a 'counterfactual machine' that challenges the traditional boundary between reality and fiction, precisely because cinema can have real and physical effects on us. By looking closely at Inglourious Basterds, I also argue that Tarantino's film is in many respects aware of the power of cinema in a physical and a cultural sense, and that the film deliberately explores how cinema can and does posit its own reality.

Wer humanitäre Kriege moralisch beurteilen will, muss sich in einem chaotischen Meer der Möglichkeiten auskennen; er muss (z.B. in der Rückschau) wissen, was geschehen wäre, hätten sich die Akteure anders entschieden. Solche Fragen betreffen keine Fakten, sondern Kontrafakten; mit kühlem Realitätssinn alleine ist diesen Fragen nicht beizukommen. Im Herzstück dieses Aufsatzes steht eine erkenntnistheoretische Analyse kontrafaktischer Sätze. Wenn ich recht liege, müssen wir uns bei der Beurteilung solcher Sätze nicht nur an die harten Fakten halten; zusätzlich brauchen wir weichere Beurteilungskriterien wie Einfühlungsvermögen, narrative Intelligenz, Phantasie – und Werthaltungen. Dass eine bestimmte Form von Pazifismus im Lichte dieser erkenntnistheoretischen These an Plausibilität gewinnt, versuche ich in den Schlussabschnitten anhand des Kosovo-Kriegs plausibel zu machen.

One way of thinking about explanations that are mind-independent in
science is that it answers “what-if-things-had-been-different” questions, supplying information about what changes in some phenomena if some change is made—these sort of statements are counterfactuals. Often in science there is physical phenomena that is not able to be explained in terms other than those of the mathematics, as opposed to explanations where mathematics seems to play the mere role of representing causal or physical facts. This raises a question: could the sort of dependence of physical facts on mathematical facts be counterfactual? In this dissertation I will argue that a counterfactual theory of extramathematical explanation can appeal to a metaphysical necessitation constraint to distinguish between cases where mathematics plays a merely representational role in explaining some physical phenomena, and cases where there is genuine mathematical explanations for the physical phenomena, a challenge raised by Baron (2016b) that I will call the explanatory genuineness problem. Using a new example of the usage of coprimeness facts in computer encryption algorithms, which is analogous to the usage of coprimeness facts in the explanation of cicada life-cycles, I argue that the fact that mathematical explanations can occur in multiple physically distinct systems is evidence in favour of the view that mathematical facts that play a genuine explanatory role represent truths about metaphysical
necessity, thus accounting for metaphysical necessitation. However, appealing to the metaphysical necessitation constraint introduces a further challenge: as evaluating a counterfactual under the metaphysical necessitation constraint will involve evaluating how a physical system is affected by the hypothetical changing of a mathematical fact at an impossible world, I argue that there is competing ways to model the effects of the same mathematical
intervention. This shows us that it is not exactly clear what aspects
of mathematical facts are representing the underlying metaphysical constraints. I conclude that even if a demarcation can be drawn between mathematical facts that play a representational and genuine explanatory role using metaphysical necessitation, a truly counterfactual theory of eme must give some epistemic position for why some evaluation of a mathematical counterfactual is agent independent.

«I 'se...' non fanno la storia, ma possono essere di aiuto. A raccontare, a delineare le 'svolte', a soppesare il ruolo degli eventi. Ma anche a realizzare, come suggeriva Nietzsche, che nella storia 'la domanda: "Che cosa sarebbe accaduto se non fosse sopravvissuta questa o quest'altra cosa?" viene respinta quasi concordemente, e tuttavia è proprio la domanda cardinale, attraverso cui tutto si trasforma in qualcosa d'ironico.'»

Cosa hanno in comune le mitiche vicende di Romolo, di Lucrezia e delle oche del Campidoglio, la precoce morte di Alessandro «il Grande», la titubanza di Annibale Barca dopo la clamorosa vittoria di Canne, la straordinaria vita di Gaio Giulio Cesare e il suo feroce assassinio, le decisive battaglie di Filippi, Azio, Teutoburgo, ponte Milvio e Adrianopoli?
Si tratta di personaggi ed eventi, leggendari o reali, che hanno segnato vere e proprie svolte nella storia di Roma antica e che – per importanza e, spesso, imprevedibilità – hanno suggerito, già tra i contemporanei, interrogativi sui destini dell’uomo e del mondo, ispirando riflessioni ucroniche e controfattuali. Insomma, hanno generato quei famigerati «se» con i quali, ci è sempre stato insegnato, non bisognerebbe mai fare la storia.
Ma quando a porseli sono uomini che la storia l’hanno fatta in prima persona, come Cesare, Napoleone o il generale Montgomery, o grandi intellettuali, quali Livio, Plutarco, Gibbon, Burckhardt o Toynbee, forse un’eccezione la meritano. Ne è convinto lo storico Luca Fezzi il quale, esplorando una dozzina di questi «se» – tutti rigorosamente «di autore» –, ci guida lungo il corso delle millenarie vicissitudini dell’Urbe, città «eterna»
ma mai immobile, anzi, sempre «in bilico» tra scenari alternativi, spesso opposti. Potremo così chiederci, con la dovuta cognizione di causa, se quanto avvenuto era già scritto, o se sussistevano invece, per Roma, altre possibilità e quali sarebbero state le eventuali conseguenze: per esempio, non nascere, non diventare repubblica, venire abbandonata per la vicina Veio, scontrarsi con Alessandro o soccombere ad Annibale, non conoscere le imprese di Cesare, le riforme di Augusto e di Costantino, resistere più a lungo alle pressioni dei popoli germanici.
Con lo stesso spirito e grazie a una profonda conoscenza delle fonti, in questo percorso poco ortodosso ma assai intrigante tra momenti epocali della vicenda di Roma e del suo impero, l’autore ridà voce al controcanto delle narrazioni e testimonianze dissonanti, minoritarie, talvolta improbabili, eco lontane del perenne contrasto tra un passato irrevocabilmente unico e l’universo dei suoi infiniti ma irrealizzati possibili.

This paper critically reviews the current status of the concept of distance in human geography in order to argue that recent experimentally-driven work in construal-level theory offers ample opportunities for recasting distance as a key geographical trope. After analysing the four entangled dimensions of distance revealed by construal-level theory (spatial distance; temporal distance; social distance; and hypothetical distance), the paper articulates this research program from experimental psychology with geographical work on non-representational theory, geographical imaginations/imaginative geographies, learning as a geographical process, TimeSpace theorizing, and ontogenetic understandings of space. It is argued that the subjective understanding of distance afforded by construal-level theory can rescue distance from its entrenched association with positivistic geography and spatial analysis. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2016.07.018

This essay argues for the value of counterfactual narrative, and more specifically counterfactual ethnography, to anthropology at a time when the unfinished project of decolonizing the discipline has once again come to the fore and the matter of living differently has acquired new urgency in light of the accelerating climate emergency. In what follows, I will discuss some of the characteristics of counterfactual narratives, explain how they might be tailored to take more than a century of ethnographic practice into account, and offer three counterfactual ethnographic scenarios by way of illustration. Toward the end of the essay, which I hope will also serve as a beginning, I offer brief reflections on what sort of distinctive contribution counterfactual ethnography might make at a time when anthropologists have increasingly embraced the notion that a good part of anthropology’s value for the wider society lies in an ethnographic record stuffed with examples of creative possibilities for what it means to be human.

En el presente trabajo pretendemos ofrecer una primera aproximación a la incorporación de ciertas herramientas formales en la dilucidación de algunas cuestiones discutidas en contextos epistemológicos. No se busca tanto ofrecer una resolución exhaustiva de estos problemas como simplemente apuntar la utilidad que revisten las semánticas modales cuando se aplican en diferentes ámbitos. En este caso expondremos cómo una serie de argumentos escépticos revisten, en último término, una estructura modal (contrafáctica) que trataremos de generalizar en un esquema útil.

Timothy Williamson has recently proposed to undermine modal skepticism by appealing to the reducibility of modal to counterfactual logic (Reducibility). Central to Williamson’s strategy is the claim that use of the same non-deductive mode of inference (counterfactual development, or CD) whereby we typically arrive at knowledge of counterfactuals suffices for arriving at knowledge of metaphysical necessity via Reducibility. Granting Reducibility, I ask whether the use of CD plays any essential role in a Reducibility-based reply to two kinds of modal skepticism. I argue that its use is entirely dispensable, and that Reducibility makes available replies to modal skeptics which show certain propositions to be metaphysically necessary by deductive arguments from premises the modal skeptic accepts can be known.

As a matter of fact, it is not only the rather few contemporary Hungarian novels with alternative historical aspirations that are in an unfortunate position but contemporary Hungarian uchronic short stories as well. Of the nearly three hundred short stories submitted in 2014-2018 as candidates for the Péter Zsoldos Award, a national annual prize awarded for the best (published) Hungarian SF novel and short story in 2014-2018, there are only six uchronic pieces. It is with the help of these pieces of short fiction that I outline (1) the (meta)taxonomies of uchronia; (2) the characteristics of those Hungarian short stories of this kind that are related to Hungary. Last but not least, a particular short story (György Horváth’s Prospektus [Brochure] is analyzed in order that the so-called ‘imperial dream’ subgenre can be presented.

Two competing approaches, namely the New Mechanistic Philosophy (NMP) and the counterfactual and interventionist ("CF+I") approach, have dominated recent debates in philosophy of science. This article argues that the two approaches are underpinned by two logics of experiment, especially in biology and medicine but also in chemistry. More concretely there are two types and hence two logics of experiment: a mechanism-oriented one and a populational one. The former seeks to identify and establish mechanisms or pathways (including entities and activities) behind biological phenomena, whereas the latter seeks to establish whether and how much a particular factor or variable impacts an outcome at the populational level. These two types of experiment actually operate upon and reflect two logics, and the word "experiment" means quite different things for them. Explicitly differentiating the two logics of experiment yields critical implications for a host of philosophical issues, from the role of counterfactuals in causal reasoning and explanations to whether natural selection is a mechanism and whether the Hodgkin-Huxley model is explanatory.

"It is a venerable slogan due to David Hume, and inherited by the empiricist tradition, that the impossible cannot be believed, or even conceived. In Positivismus und Realismus, Moritz Schlick claimed that, while the merely practically impossible is still conceivable, the logically impossible, such as an explicit inconsistency, is simply unthinkable.

An opposite philosophical tradition, however, maintains that inconsistencies and logical impossibilities are thinkable, and sometimes believable, too. In the Science of Logic, Hegel already complained against “one of the fundamental prejudices of logic as hitherto understood”, namely that “the contradictory cannot be imagined or thought” (Hegel 1931: 430). Our representational capabilities are not limited to the possible, for we appear to be able to imagine and describe also impossibilities — perhaps without being aware that they are impossible.

Such impossibilities and inconsistencies are what this entry is about..."

One sense of 'imagination' that matters in epistemology has the word mean 'reality-oriented mental simulation' (ROMS): we suppose that something is the case; develop the supposition by importing background knowledge and beliefs; and check what is true in the imagined scenario.
What is the logic of ROMS? Imagination has a reputation for being logically anarchic. In particular, it's hyperintensional: we can imagine A without imagining a necessarily equivalent B. This work considers a Principle of Equivalence in Imagination which, if accepted, will limit the anarchy: when A and B are equivalent in imagination, one will imagine the same things after supposing either in ROMS.
What is equivalence in imagination? It is suggested that it's cognitive equivalence. A and B are cognitively equivalent for one when they play the same role in one's cognitive life: whatever one understands, concludes, etc., given either, one does, given the other. ROMS is logically modelled via variably strict modals. Two formal semantics are proposed for them: one uses possible worlds plus an algebra of topics; the other resorts to impossible worlds. The two deal with equivalence in imagination in subtly different ways.

In this thesis, I develop a general framework of how people attribute responsibility. In this framework, people’s responsibility attributions are modelled in terms of counterfactuals defined over a causal representation of the situation. A person is predicted to be held responsible to the extent that their action made a difference to the outcome. Accordingly, when attributing responsibility we compare what actually happened with the outcome in a simulated counterfactual world in which the person’s action had been different. However, a person can still be held responsible for an outcome even if their action made no difference in the actual situation. Responsibility attributions are sensitive to whether a person’s action would have made a difference in similar counterfactual situations. Generally, responsibility decreases with the number of events that would have needed to change from the actual situation in order to generate a counterfactual situation in which the person’s action would have been pivotal. In addition to how close a person was to being pivotal, responsibility attributions are influenced by how critical a person’s action was perceived prior to the outcome.

The predictions derived from this general framework are tested in a series of experiments that manipulate a person’s criticality and pivotality by varying the causal structure of the situation and the person’s mental states. The results show that responsibility between the members of a group diffuses according to the causal structure which determines how individual contributions combine to yield a joint outcome. Differences in the group members’ mental states, such as their knowledge about the situation, their expectations about each other’s performance as well as their intentions, also affect attributions. Finally, I demonstrate how this general framework can be extended to model attributions for domains in which people have rich, intuitive theories that go beyond what can be expressed with simple causal models.

Terrorism studies has an enduring puzzle: how do terrorist organisations grow, persist and survive? Using the Japanese new religion Aum Shinrikyo as a case study, this thesis posits that three causal mechanisms—cultural transmission, social learning, and folklore—affect terrorist organisations’ survivability, success, or failure. Original contributions to knowledge include a new analytical theory of strategic subcultures in terrorist organisations, new tests using the qualitative methodology of process tracing, and a new causal analysis of Aum Shinrikyo’s initiatory, religious sub-system (which facilitated founder Shoko Asahara’s paranoid delusions, leadership elite deviance, and follower indoctrinability). A new research agenda is also identified.

The claim that Chinese had neither unambiguous, nor obligatory syntactic or morphological markers of counterfactuality, which has loomed large with philosophers of language, sinologists, and cognitive psychologists during the better part of the 20th century, is reviewed here from a diachronic and typological perspective, focussing on Old Chinese (OC). In contradistinction from the cross-linguistically widespread use of past-tense morphology or, less commonly, of dissociative spatial markers, the predominant strategy to mark counterfactuals in OC was ‘direct’ assertion in the protasis. It made use of a non-indicative copula marked for stativity by prefixation, which acts as a complementizer vis-à-vis the dependent clause. Morphological analysis, building upon advances in the reconstruction of OC
phonology in Jacques (2000), suggests that OC combined this non-indicative copula with a causative morpheme (*s-) to encode concessives and with an existential negative (*ma-) to
express a non-facultative negative counterfactual, surfacing as wēi 微 (“if it be not that...”). Straightforward “positive” counterfactuality could also be expressed through conjunction
compounding in late Classical and Medieval Chinese, or by the use of simple superordinate verbs such as shǐ 使 or lìng 令. Morphologically, these share the property of being derived
from the underlying verb base by causative or deontic prefixes, but CF interpretation also depends on the interplay with schetic markers and pragmatic embedding in the remainder of the sentence. Non-obligatory marking of counterfactuals thus emerges as a preference,
not as a categorical incapacity, while the choice of ‘direct’ assertion, rather than temporal or distal implicatures to convey it, is unrelated to the richness of morphology in a given
language.

Un énoncé avec 'devoir' au conditionnel passé, comme ''Pierre aurait dû être surpris', semble fortement orienté vers l'interprétation contrefactuelle (Pierre n'a pas été surpris). Or ni le conditionnel passé, ni le verbe devoir, n'imposent à eux seuls une telle lecture. Notre proposition est qu'elle surgit pragmatiquement (elle n'est donc pas absolument obligatoire) à cause de la perspective passée et de la conjonction et de l'ordre de portée des valeurs évidentielles respectives de 'devoir' et du conditionnel.

This paper presents the fieldwork data on the interaction of actionality, aspect and tense in counterfactual conditional clauses of the Kuban dialect of Kabardian, a polysynthetic Northwest Caucasian language. Kabardian shows non-trivial similarities to Romance languages in using its imperfective past suffix as a marker of counterfactuality — alone or as a part of the complex marker of the Pluperfect where the Imperfect attaches to the Preterite (perfective past). I show that the choice between several types of marking in counterfactual protases (the plain Imperfect, the Pluperfect and the simple Preterite) primarily depends on actional class and viewpoint aspect: perfective counterfactuals employ either the Pluperfect or the Preterite, while imperfective counterfactuals require the Imperfect, which is in line with the more general distribution of these tense-aspect forms. Theoretical implications of the tense-aspect marking in Kuban Kabardian counter-factual conditionals are also briefly discussed.