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Useful Counterfactuals

Useful Counterfactuals by Tom Costello and John McCarthy is published in the ETAI (Electronic Transactions on Artificial Intelligence), Vol 3 (1999), Section A.

This paper, by Tom Costello and John McCarthy, Stanford University, appeared in ETAI (Electronic Transactions on Artificial Intelligence), ETAI, Vol 3 (1999), Section A.

Counterfactual conditional sentences are useful to people and can be useful in artificial intelligence. In particular, they allow reasoners to learn from experiences that they did not quite have. The truth of a counterfactual and the conclusions that can be drawn from a counterfactual are theory dependent, and different theories are useful in different circumstances.

A simple class of useful counterfactuals involves a change of one component of a point in a space provided with a cartesian product structure. We call these cartesian counterfactuals. Cartesian counterfactuals can be modeled by assignment and contents functions as in program semantics. We also study the more general tree-structured counterfactuals.

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