FROM CAUSAL MODELS TO COUNTERFACTUAL STRUCTURES

From Causal Models To Counterfactual Structures

Galles and Pearl [1998] claimed that “for recursive models, the causal model framework does not add any restrictions to counterfactuals, beyond those imposed by Lewis’s [possible-worlds] framework.” This claim is examined carefully, with the goal of clarifying the exact relationship between causal models and Lewis’s framework. Recursive models are shown to correspond precisely to a subclass of ...

From counterfactual simulation to causal judgment

In this paper, we demonstrate that people’s causal judgments are inextricably linked to counterfactuals. In our experiments, participants judge whether one billiard ball A caused another ball B to go through a gate. Our counterfactual simulation model predicts that people arrive at their causal judgments by comparing what actually happened with the result of mentally simulating what would have ...

Causal Explanations in Counterfactual Reasoning

This paper explores the role of causal explanations in evaluating counterfactual conditionals. In reasoning about what would have been the case if A had been true, the localist injunction to hold constant all the variables that causally influence whether A is true or not, is sometimes unreasonably constraining. We hypothesize that speakers may resolve this tension by including in their delibera...

Running head: CAUSAL AND COUNTERFACTUAL EXPLANATION Mental Simulation and the Nexus of Causal and Counterfactual Explanation

Counterfactual Control for Free from Generative Models

We introduce a method by which a generative model learning the joint distribution between actions and future states can be used to automatically infer a control scheme for any desired reward function, which may be altered on the fly without retraining the model. In this method, the problem of action selection is reduced to one of gradient descent on the latent space of the generative model, wit...