Basic Conditional Reasoning: How Children Mimic Counterfactual Reasoning

Leahy, Brian; Rafetseder, Eva; Perner, Josef

doi:10.1007/s11225-013-9510-7

Cited by 29 publications

(19 citation statements)

References 16 publications

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“…A formal description of how younger and older children approach counterfactual tasks (Leahy, Rafetseder, & Perner, 2013 ) assumes that older children and adults understand that the counterfactual antecedent is meant to contradict what actually happened in the last episode to which the question refers. And it assumes that they reason about what would be the case if that episode had taken place except for the changes stipulated by the counterfactual assumption (and changes made necessary by logical consequences).…”

Section: Formal Characterization Of Cfr and Bcrmentioning

confidence: 99%

Counterfactual Reasoning: Sharpening Conceptual Distinctions in Developmental Studies

Rafetseder

Perner

2014

Child Dev Perspectives

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Counterfactual reasoning (CFR)—mentally representing what the world would be like now if things had been different in the past—is an important aspect of human cognition and the focus of research in areas such as philosophy, social psychology, and clinical psychology. More recently, it has also gained broad interest in cognitive developmental psychology, mainly focusing on the question of how this kind of reasoning can be characterized. Studies have been inconsistent in identifying when children can use CFR. In this article, we present theoretical positions that may account for this inconsistency and evaluate them in the light of research on counterfactual emotions.

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Section: Formal Characterization Of Cfr and Bcrmentioning

confidence: 99%

Counterfactual Reasoning: Sharpening Conceptual Distinctions in Developmental Studies

Rafetseder

Perner

2014

Child Dev Perspectives

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“…even three year old children answered correctly with 'no'. However, it's possible that children answered this question without running through a counterfactual simulation of what would have happened, and relying on basic conditional reasoning instead (Leahy, Rafetseder, & Perner, 2014). In general, if shoes are dirty the floor gets dirty, and if shoes are clean the floor stays clean.…”

Section: The Development Of Counterfactual Reasoningmentioning

confidence: 99%

What would have happened? Counterfactuals, hypotheticals, and causal judgments

Gerstenberg

2022

Preprint

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How do people make causal judgments? In this paper, I show that counterfactuals are necessary for explaining causal judgments about events, and that hypotheticals don't suffice. In two experiments, participants viewed video clips of dynamic interactions between billiard balls. In Experiment 1, participants either made hypothetical judgments about whether ball B would go through the gate if ball A weren't present in the scene, or counterfactual judgments about whether ball B would have gone through the gate if ball A hadn't been present. Because the clips featured a block in front of the gate that sometimes moved and sometimes stayed put, hypothetical and counterfactual judgments came apart. A computational model that evaluates hypotheticals and counterfactuals by running noisy physical simulations accurately captured participants' judgments. In Experiment 2, participants judged whether ball A caused ball B to go through the gate. The results showed a tight fit between counterfactual and causal judgments, whereas hypothetical judgments didn't predict causal judgments. I discuss the implications of this work for theories of causality, and for studying the development of counterfactual thinking in children.

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“…Rips and Marcus (1977), for instance, discuss suppositions as cognitive analogues of the possible worlds. The notion of a possible world also proved to be useful in the context of developmental research on counterfactual reasoning (see, e.g., Rafetseder, Cristi-Vargas, & Perner, 2010;Leahy, Rafetseder, & Perner, 2014). 39 There is psychological evidence that people often have clear intuitions about which alternatives to the reality are more plausible than others.…”

Section: The Possible Worlds Accountmentioning

confidence: 99%

Conditionals and testimony

Collins

Krzyżanowska

Hartmann

et al. 2020

Cognitive Psychology

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Conditionals and conditional reasoning have been a long-standing focus of research across a number of disciplines, ranging from psychology through linguistics to philosophy. But almost no work has concerned itself with the question of how hearing or reading a conditional changes our beliefs. Given that we acquire much-perhaps most-of what we believe through the testimony of others, the simple matter of acquiring conditionals via others' assertion of a conditional seems integral to any full understanding of the conditional and conditional reasoning. In this paper we detail a number of basic intuitions about how beliefs might change in response to a conditional being uttered, and show how these are backed by behavioral data. In the remainder of the paper, we then show how these deceptively simple phenomena pose a fundamental challenge to present theoretical accounts of the conditional and conditional reasoning -a challenge which no account presently fully meets. IntroductionEach day we encounter conditional sentences: sentences, most typically, of the form "If P, (then) Q". Conditionals can make assertions: "If people smoke, they have a higher risk of lung cancer." They can give advice or warnings: "If you stand here (there), you'll have a better (worse) view." They can express promises-"If I'm free, I promise I'll come to your party"-and bets-"If Liverpool and Tottenham make the final, I bet you £50 Liverpool will win." They can make claims about worlds that turned out differently from our own-"If Oswald hadn't killed Kennedy, someone else would have"-or that may yet come to pass-"If a sane candidate were to win, we might not be doomed." In short, conditionals are a flexible way to communicate information, or perform speech acts, under uncertainty.When we receive such conditionals, we must interpret them and we may change our beliefs. These sentences seem natural: we seem to understand them effortlessly and, where appropriate, assimilate their content seamlessly. And yet it remains somewhat mysterious how we change our beliefs when we encounter a conditional. This paper pursues the question of how we change our beliefs in response to conditional assertions. It will focus on indicative conditionals: conditional sentences in the indicative mood or, roughly, in which tense has the usual temporal meaning: present means present; past means past; and so on (Declerck & Reed, 2001). Another key type of conditional is the subjunctive or counterfactual conditional. To see the difference, compare these examples from

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Basic Conditional Reasoning: How Children Mimic Counterfactual Reasoning

Cited by 29 publications

References 16 publications

Counterfactual Reasoning: Sharpening Conceptual Distinctions in Developmental Studies

Counterfactual Reasoning: Sharpening Conceptual Distinctions in Developmental Studies

What would have happened? Counterfactuals, hypotheticals, and causal judgments

Conditionals and testimony

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