Revealing the counterfactuals: molinism, stubbornness, and deception

Counterfactuals

Counterfactuals arc a form of commonsense non-monotonic inference that has been of long-term interest to philosophers. In this paper, we begin by describing some of the impact counterfactuals can be exported to have in artif icial intelligence, and by reviewing briefly some of the philosophical conclusions which have been drawn about them. Philosophers have noted that the content of any particu...

Counterfactuals and the Prisoner’s Dilemma

Counterfactuals and the Past Hypothesis

Counterfactuals to the Rescue

All theories of subjunctives—Goodman’s, Lewis’s, mine—share what is essentially the same problem, that of specifying what you hang on to and what you give up when you make a counterfactual supposition: suppose such-and-such had been the case; what do you hold constant? For Goodman this is the problem of cotenability, for Lewis it’s the problem of closeness, for me, it’s the problem of which con...

Opinion dynamics within a virtual small group: the stubbornness effect

1 Department of Psychology, Center for the Study of Complex Dynamics, University of Florence, Firenze, Italy, 2 Center for the Study of Complex Dynamics, Firenze, Italy, 3 Department of Physics and Astronomy, Center for the Study of Complex Dynamics, Sesto Fiorentino, Italy, 4 Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare-Sezione di Firenze, Firenze, Italy, 5 Instituto de Fisica Interdisciplinar y Sist...