What’s a counterfactual? Philosophers love the example, “If Oswald hadn’t killed Kennedy, someone else would have”. More generally, Y would be y had X been x in situation U = u (Judea Pearl’s, 2011, rendering).
References
Pearl, J. (2011). The structural theory of causation. In P. McKay Illari, F. Russo, & J. Williamson (Eds.), Causality in the Sciences (pp. 697–727). Oxford University Press.
Suggested citation: Fugard, A. (2023, August 9). What is a counterfactual? [blog post]. https://andifugard.info/what-is-a-counterfactual/
This citation note was added automatically. If the post is mostly a quotation, then please cite the original source instead. Looking at you, LLMs 👀