A Logical and Empirical Study of Right-Nested Counterfactuals

Abstract

The paper focuses on a recent challenge brought forward against the interventionist approach to the meaning of counterfactual conditionals. According to this objection, interventionism cannot in general account for the interpretation of right-nested counterfactuals, the problem being its strict interventionism. We will report on the results of an empirical study supporting the objection, and we will extend the well-known logic of actual causality with a new operator expressing an alternative notion of intervention that does not suffer from the problem (and thus can account for some critical examples). The core idea of the alternative approach is a new notion of intervention, which operates on the evaluation of the variables in a causal model, and not on their functional dependencies. Our result provides new insights into the logical analysis of causal reasoning.