Causal Explanations in Counterfactual Reasoning
msra
摘要
This paper explores the role of causal explanations in eval- uating counterfactual conditionals. In reasoning about what would have been the case if A had been true, the localist in- junction to hold constant all the variables that causally influ- ence whether A is true or not, is sometimes unreasonably con- straining. We hypothesize that speakers may resolve this ten- sion by including in their deliberations the question of what would explain the hypothesized truth of A. To account for our recent psychological findings about counterfactuals, an alter- native approach based on Causal Bayesian networks is pro- posed in which the intervention operator utilizes the agent's beliefs about the explanatory power of the antecedent of the counterfactual. The results of three psychological experiments are reported in which the new method succeeds in predicting subjects' responses while the traditional method for evaluating counterfactuals in Bayesian networks fails.
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关键词
counterfactual reasoning,causal explanations,causal networks.
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