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		   Independence in counterfactuals

			   Stefan Kaufmann
		       Northwestern University


This talk presents two frameworks for theorizing about counterfactual
conditionals and causality, proposes an integrated analysis, and
concludes with new questions and directions for linguistic research on
counterfactuals.

Ever since Goodman's (1947) groundbreaking work, semanticists have
searched for a general and non-circular way to decide which true
propositions affect the interpretation of conditionals with false
antecedents.  The Premise Semantics of Veltman (1976) and Kratzer
(1981) is a widely known formal framework for addressing this
question.  The answer remains elusive, however, despite several
attempts over the years to reduce the problem of counterfactuals to
some notion of world-internal structure (Kratzer, 1989, 2003; Kanazawa
et al., 2005; Veltman, 2005).

Meanwhile, a separate line of research in statistics, artificial
intelligence, philosophy and psychology has developed sophisticated
ways of representing causal (in)dependencies, modeling causal
inferences, and testing causal claims empirically (Pearl 2000, among
others).  Claims about counterfactuals are frequently made in this
literature, but their relationship to familiar semantic theories is
not always obvious.  Moreover, recent psychological research into the
way speakers interpret conditionals, both indicative and
counterfactual (e.g., Sloman and Lagnado, 2005) lends only partial
support to those claims and seems to call for substantial refinements.

I will show that an implementation of this sort of causal reasoning in
the framework of Kratzer-style Premise Semantics is both
straightforward and instructive, shedding light on long-standing
empirical disagreements about counterfactuals.  In the more
programmatic latter part of the talk, I will point out connections
between recent studies in cognitive psychology and well-established
theories of lexical semantics, which suggest promising avenues for
psycholinguistic investigation.

References:

Goodman, N. 1947.  The problem of counterfactual conditionals.  The
Journal of Philosophy, 44:113-128.

Kanazawa, M., S. Kaufmann, and S. Peters. 2005.  On the lumping
semantics of counterfactuals. Journal of Semantics 22:129-151.

Kratzer, A. 1981.  Partition and revision: The semantics of
counterfactuals. Journal of Philosophical Logic, 10:201-216.

Kratzer, A. 1989. An investigation of the lumps of thought.
Linguistics and Philosophy, 12:607-653.

Kratzer, A. 2002. Facts: Particulars of information units?
Linguistics and Philosophy, 25:655-670.

Kratzer, A. 2005. Constraining premise sets for
counterfactuals. Journal of Semantics, 22:153-158.

Pearl, J. 2000. Causality: Models, Reasoning, and Inference.
Cambridge University Press.

Sloman, S. and D. Lagnado. Do we 'do'? Cognitive Science 29:5-39.

Veltman, F. 2005. Making counterfactual assumptions.  Journal of
Semantics, 22:159-180.