TY - JOUR
T1 - Counterfactuals in critical thinking with application to morality
AU - Pereira, Luís Moniz
AU - Saptawijaya, Ari
N1 - Funding Information:
AS acknowledges the support from Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT/MEC) Portugal, grant SFRH/BD/72795/2010. LMP acknowledges the support from FCT/MEC NOVA LINCS PEst UID/CEC/04516/2013. We thank Emmanuelle-Anna Dietz for the fruitful discussions.
Publisher Copyright:
© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016.
PY - 2016
Y1 - 2016
N2 - Counterfactuals are conjectures about what would have happened, had an alternative event occurred. It provides lessons for the future by virtue of contemplating alternatives; it permits thought debugging; it supports a justification why different alternatives would have been worse or not better. Typical expressions are: “If only I were taller …”, “I could have been a winner …”, “I would have passed, were it not for …”, “Even if … the same would follow”. Counterfactuals have been well studied in Linguistics, Philosophy, Physics, Ethics, Psychology, Anthropology, and Computation, but not much within Critical Thinking. The purpose of this study is to illustrate counterfactual thinking, through logic program abduction and updating, and inspired by Pearl’s structural theory of counterfactuals, with an original application to morality, a common concern for critical thinking. In summary, we show counterfactual reasoning to be quite useful for critical thinking, namely about moral issues.
AB - Counterfactuals are conjectures about what would have happened, had an alternative event occurred. It provides lessons for the future by virtue of contemplating alternatives; it permits thought debugging; it supports a justification why different alternatives would have been worse or not better. Typical expressions are: “If only I were taller …”, “I could have been a winner …”, “I would have passed, were it not for …”, “Even if … the same would follow”. Counterfactuals have been well studied in Linguistics, Philosophy, Physics, Ethics, Psychology, Anthropology, and Computation, but not much within Critical Thinking. The purpose of this study is to illustrate counterfactual thinking, through logic program abduction and updating, and inspired by Pearl’s structural theory of counterfactuals, with an original application to morality, a common concern for critical thinking. In summary, we show counterfactual reasoning to be quite useful for critical thinking, namely about moral issues.
KW - Abduction
KW - Counterfactual reasoning
KW - Critical thinking
KW - Morality
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85019604032&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1007/978-3-319-38983-7_15
DO - 10.1007/978-3-319-38983-7_15
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85019604032
SN - 2192-6255
VL - 27
SP - 279
EP - 289
JO - Studies in Applied Philosophy, Epistemology and Rational Ethics
JF - Studies in Applied Philosophy, Epistemology and Rational Ethics
ER -