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Published 2011 | public
Book Section - Chapter

Counterfactual Availability and Causal Judgment

Abstract

In this paper I survey the psychological literature on counterfactual availability. While humans have the capacity to engage in counterfactual reasoning, we do not do so indiscriminately. Rather, we tend to entertain specific kinds of counterfactual hypotheses. Psychologists have studied the sorts of factors that influence the counterfactuals we entertain. I argue that we can expect these factors to exert a related influence on causal judgments, and connect this thesis with a number of discussions from the philosophical literature on causation.

Additional Information

© 2011 Oxford University Press. I would like to thank Peter Godfrey-Smith, Alison Gopnik, Dennis Hilton, Josh Knobe, David Lagnado, David Mandel, Jim Woodward, audience members at the McDonnell workshop on Causal and Moral Cognition (California Institute of Technology), the University of Southern California, the workshop on the Origins and Functions of Causal Thinking IV (Venice, Italy), the Workshop on Casual and Counterfactual Understanding (University of Warwick), and the Workshop on Counterfactuals (Erasmus University, Rotterdam).

Additional details

Created:
August 19, 2023
Modified:
October 26, 2023