Speaker: Kaibo Xie (ILLC)
Date and Time: Thursday, May 2nd 2019, 16:30-18:00
Venue: ILLC Seminar Room F1.15, Science Park 107.
Title: A non-strict-interventionist account for nested counterfactuals.
Abstract. Halpern and Pearl provide a way to characterize the meaning of counterfactuals by causal models. But their semantics only accounts for non-nested counterfactuals. A lot of literature has investigated the semantics of nested-counterfactuals based on causal modelling, e.g. Briggs (2012). However, many of those approaches have assumed that the value of the antecedent variables should be independent of the values of their parents in any causal intervention, which is called “the strict-interventionist condition” by Fisher. Fisher shows that there is a problem inherent to all semantic theories with the strict interventionist condition, which is brought out via a class of counterexamples. The talk will provide semantics for right-nested counterfactuals without assuming the “strict-interventionist condition”, while it does not change Halpern and Briggs’ underlying idea.