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Counterfactuals in Critical Thinking, with Application to Morality
May 2015
spic15-counterfactuals
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 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.
In proceedings
Luís Moniz Pereira, Ari Saptawijaya
Proceedings of II International Critical Thinking Seminar (SPIC'15),
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http://centria.di.fct.unl.pt/~lmp/publications/online-papers/Counterfactuals%20in%20Critical%20Morality.pdf
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Luís Moniz Pereira and Ari Saptawijaya, Counterfactuals in Critical Thinking, with Application to Morality, , Proceedings of II International Critical Thinking Seminar (SPIC'15),, (http://centria.di.fct.unl.pt/~lmp/publications/online-papers/Counterfactuals%20in%20Critical%20Morality.pdf), May 2015.
<a href="/people/members/view.php?code=6175f826202ff877fba2ad77784cb9cb" class="author">Luís Moniz Pereira</a> and <a href="/people/members/view.php?code=3296a2fcb759ac3f30bc313a41f955bc" class="author">Ari Saptawijaya</a>, <b>Counterfactuals in Critical Thinking, with Application to Morality</b>, <u>Proceedings of II International Critical Thinking Seminar (SPIC'15),</u>, (<a href="http://centria.di.fct.unl.pt/~lmp/publications/online-papers/Counterfactuals%20in%20Critical%20Morality.pdf" target="_blank">url</a>), May 2015.
@inproceedings {spic15-counterfactuals, author = {Lu\'{\i}s Moniz Pereira and Ari Saptawijaya}, title = {Counterfactuals in Critical Thinking, with Application to Morality}, booktitle = {Proceedings of II International Critical Thinking Seminar (SPIC'15),}, url = {http://centria.di.fct.unl.pt/~lmp/publications/online-papers/Counterfactuals%20in%20Critical%20Morality.pdf}, abstract = {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 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.}, keywords = {critical thinking, counterfactual reasoning, abduction, morality}, month = {May}, year = {2015}, }
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