Related papers: In Defence of the Material Conditional
Counterfactuals are often described as 'retrospective,' focusing on hypothetical alternatives to a realized past. This description relates to an often implicit assumption about the structure and stability of exogenous variables in the…
Counterfactual reasoning -- envisioning hypothetical scenarios, or possible worlds, where some circumstances are different from what (f)actually occurred (counter-to-fact) -- is ubiquitous in human cognition. Conventionally,…
The reflection principle is the statement that if a sentence is provable then it is true. Reflection principles have been studied for first-order theories, but they also play an important role in propositional proof complexity. In this…
Natural revision seems so natural: it changes beliefs as little as possible to incorporate new information. Yet, some counterexamples show it wrong. It is so conservative that it never fully believes. It only believes in the current…
A common assumption in causal inference from observational data is that there is no hidden confounding. Yet it is, in general, impossible to verify this assumption from a single dataset. Under the assumption of independent causal mechanisms…
Mechanistic interpretability papers increasingly use causal vocabulary: circuits, mediators, causal abstraction, monosemanticity. Such claims require explicit identification assumptions. A purposive audit of 10 papers across four…
An ultimate universal theory -- a complete theory that accounts, via few and simple first principles, for all the phenomena already observed and that will ever be observed -- has been, and still is, the aspiration of most physicists and…
A definition of what counts as an explanation of mathematical statement, and when one explanation is better than another, is given. Since all mathematical facts must be true in all causal models, and hence known by an agent, mathematical…
Astrophysical paradoxes are the paradoxes of physics. The main motivation of a formulated paradox is clearly recognized in the scientific environment because the phenomenon of a paradox itself has become interesting. There is an explanation…
The rich body of physical theories defines the foundation of our understanding of the world. Its mathematical formulation is based on classical Aristotelian (binary) logic. In the philosophy of science the ambiguities, paradoxes, and the…
Many econometrics textbooks imply that under mean independence of the regressors and the error term, the OLS parameters have a causal interpretation. We show that even when this assumption is satisfied, OLS might identify a pseudo-parameter…
Contextuality was originally defined only for consistently connected systems of random variables (those without disturbance/signaling). Contextuality-by-Default theory (CbD) offers an extension of the notion of contextuality to…
We deepen the study of conjoined and disjoined conditional events in the setting of coherence. These objects, differently from other approaches, are defined in the framework of conditional random quantities. We show that some well known…
Knowing the truth is rarely enough -- we also seek out reasons why the fact is true. While much is known about how we explain contingent truths, we understand less about how we explain facts, such as those in mathematics, that are true as a…
In this paper we study selected argument forms involving counterfactuals and indicative conditionals under uncertainty. We selected argument forms to explore whether people with an Eastern cultural background reason differently about…
Logics closed under classes of substitutions broader than class of uniform substitutions are known as hyperformal logics. This paper extends known results about hyperformal logics in two ways. First: we examine a very powerful form of…
Relational verification encompasses research directions such as reasoning about data abstraction, reasoning about security and privacy, secure compilation, and functional specificaton of tensor programs, among others. Several relational…
Defeasible reasoning is a kind of reasoning where some generalisations may not be valid in all circumstances, that is general conclusions may fail in some cases. Various formalisms have been developed to model this kind of reasoning, which…
AI-driven outcomes can be challenging for end-users to understand. Explanations can address two key questions: "Why this outcome?" (factual) and "Why not another?" (counterfactual). While substantial efforts have been made to formalize…
We propose a new definition of actual causes, using structural equations to model counterfactuals.We show that the definitions yield a plausible and elegant account ofcausation that handles well examples which have caused problems forother…