TY - JOUR
T1 - A Peculiarity in Pearl’s Logic of Interventionist Counterfactuals
AU - Zhang, Jiji
AU - Lam, Wai-Yin
AU - De Clercq, Rafael
N1 - Funding Information:
We thank Joseph Halpern for providing an important reference, and two anonymous referees for helpful comments. J. Zhang’s research was supported in part by the Research Grants Council of Hong Kong under the General Research Fund LU341910.
Publisher copyright:
© 2012, Springer Science Business Media Dordrecht
PY - 2013/10
Y1 - 2013/10
N2 - We examine a formal semantics for counterfactual conditionals due to Judea Pearl, which formalizes the interventionist interpretation of counterfactuals central to the interventionist accounts of causation and explanation. We show that a characteristic principle validated by Pearl’s semantics, known as the principle of reversibility, states a kind of irreversibility: counterfactual dependence (in David Lewis’s sense) between two distinct events is irreversible. Moreover, we show that Pearl’s semantics rules out only mutual counterfactual dependence, not cyclic dependence in general. This, we argue, suggests that Pearl’s logic is either too weak or too strong.
AB - We examine a formal semantics for counterfactual conditionals due to Judea Pearl, which formalizes the interventionist interpretation of counterfactuals central to the interventionist accounts of causation and explanation. We show that a characteristic principle validated by Pearl’s semantics, known as the principle of reversibility, states a kind of irreversibility: counterfactual dependence (in David Lewis’s sense) between two distinct events is irreversible. Moreover, we show that Pearl’s semantics rules out only mutual counterfactual dependence, not cyclic dependence in general. This, we argue, suggests that Pearl’s logic is either too weak or too strong.
KW - Causal model
KW - Counterfactual logic
KW - Counterfactual dependence
KW - Interventionism
UR - https://www.scopus.com/record/display.uri?eid=2-s2.0-84884403471&origin=resultslist
U2 - 10.1007/s10992-012-9249-z
DO - 10.1007/s10992-012-9249-z
M3 - Article
SN - 0022-3611
VL - 42
SP - 783
EP - 794
JO - Journal of Philosophical Logic
JF - Journal of Philosophical Logic
IS - 5
ER -