Counterfactual counterfactually thinking

McMullen, M. N., Markman, K. D., and Gavanski, l. (1995), "Living in neither the best nor worst of all possible worlds," in N. J. Roese and J. M. Olson (eds.), What Might Have Been The Social Psychology of Counterfactual Thinking, Mahwah, N.J. Lawrence Erlbaum, pp. 133-68. 

Miller, D. T., and McFarland, C. (1986), "Counterfactual thinking and victim compensation," Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 12,513-19. 

In addition we must stipulate that B prefers the counterfactual situation in which A does W and he does Z to the one in which A does X and he does Y. (If the coercion takes the form of preference manipulation, this must be understood with reference to the pre-coercion preferences. ) We need not, I think, stipulate that A prefers the actual situation to the counterfac-hial one. A may coerce B just to flex his muscles. Standardly, however, A will indeed coerce B for his own benefit, broadly conceived. ... 

Kim (2007) suggests that the truth makers of counterfactuals or the counterfactuals that go along with mental causation involve causation as production. This is correct if one has in mind the fundamental physical laws evolving fundamental physical states. But Kim is more likely thinking of what 1 called local production. Relations of local production are not the truth makers of counterfactuals on Lewis s account. The fundamental laws and fundamental physical state are the ultimate truth makers of both kinds of causal relations. 

Although Kim doesn t discuss backtracking in detail, I think he may have something like the following worry in mind. On Lewis s account, the worlds relevant to evaluating y4(r) > B are ones in which at the nearest time prior to t there is a small violation of law that leads to A ). But for some y4(r), that time may be much prior to t. For example, had Halley s Comet intersected the orbit of Jupiter at t, it would have had to intersect the orbit of Saturn At t— k. Getting the comet intersecting Jupiter s orbit at t when in fact the comet is near Saturn at r would involve too big a miracle at times after t— For the planetary system it may be that the past counterfactually... 

C is a common cause of A and B when C causes both A and B but there is no causal relation between A and B. For example, a rock thrown into the center of a pool (Q causes a wave to hit at point a and at point b at time t. The worry is that the counterfactual i(A had not occurred, then B would not have occurred may appear to be true. In fact, I think that in ordinary language this counterfactual is plausibly tme in the situation 1 described. But recall that the characterization of causation as dependence involves a very particular way of evaluating counterfactuals. On that way this counterfactual is false since the world in which a small violation of law occurs just before r that leads to A not occurring but leaves all else the same, including B, is a more similar world to the actual world than the world that also leads to the wave not hitting b at t. Again, as in the backtracking case, there may be systems that are set up so that one does obtain counterfactual dependence between events that are effects of a common cause. But this won t occur with respect to mental events and their putative effects. 

Note that the point isn t that we are evaluating the counterfactual in what Lewis thinks of as a backtracking way of evaluating similarity but rather that Lewis s way of evaluating similarity leads to backtracking in certain situations. 

I think, however, that we need not despair of resolving the issue, though I don t expect to resolve it here. 1 think that the issue can be adequately addressed without settling the matter of what, exactly, causation is. The leading theories of causation are nomic subsumption theories, counter-factual theories, and transference theories. " Let us set aside transference theories and also nomic subsumption theories according to which laws involve a kind oisuigeneris nomic necessity. Let us focus on only regularity and counterfactual theories - non-oomph theories - and avoid any appeal to the idea of causal work. ... 

The idea that there are functional events in the role-functionalist sense does not jibe with Lewis s counterfactual theory of causation. Lewis, as we saw earlier, did not countenance functional events in that sense. The preceding discussion might well indicate reasons in addition to those that he explicitly gives when rejecting the idea that events have functional essences. I myself do not take such functional events to pose a problem for the thesis that a counterfactual dependency between distinct (in Lewis s sense) events suffices for causation. I think, rather, that a proponent of that thesis should follow Lewis in denying that there are functional events in the NRP theorist s sense. 

Sam Peltzman s methodological approach differs from the technological approach in that he focuses on human behavior especially driver choice. He begins with an individual benefit-cost framework to traffic safety and combines with it findings from other safety studies to construct counterfactual estimates of traffic fatality rates, hypothetical rates which would have occurred without a national traffic safety policy. We will examine his study in some detail because most of the studies are similar m crucial aspects and hence we can examine other studies more quickly. Peltzman s study is pivotal in that it was one of the first comprehensive evaluative studies. It reintroduced human behavior into traffic safety thinking. 

Woodward, 2002, p. 371] explains what makes a mechanism a causal explanation in terms of the patterns of counterfactual dependence [between the components of the mechanism] that are associated with manipulation and control. There are aspects of Woodward s account of mechanisms that apply nicely to reaction mechanisms, but I think more can be said about how the potential applications of a mechanism (to confront novel cases in synthetic design, for instance) impact on the nature of its components and their interrelation. Likewise, [Machamer et al., 2000] also bring out the fact that mechanisms can be more or less schematic, and may bottom-out in different kinds of entities or activities, but they do little to explain why particular mechanisms bottom out where they do. In organic chemistry, at least, the answers to these questions lie in the details of the explanatory structure and in the driving problems of the discipline. 

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