Mathematical economics

Meaning (existential)

Mathematics

Counterfactual thinking

Epistemology

Possible world

Principle of compositionality

Philosophy

Artificial intelligence

Psychology

Semantics (computer science)

Programming language

Geometry

Constraint (computer-aided design)

Antecedent (behavioral psychology)

Computer science

Linguistics

Truth value

Interpretation (philosophy)

Truth condition

Counterfactual conditional

Social psychology

Linguistics and Philosophy

Based on a crowdsourced truth value judgment experiment, we provide empirical evidence challenging two classical views in semantics, and we develop a novel account of counterfactuals that combines ideas from inquisitive semantics and causal reasoning. First, we show that two truth-conditionally equivalent clauses can make different semantic contributions when embedded in a counterfactual antecedent. Assuming compositionality, this means that the meaning of these clauses is not fully determined by their truth conditions. This finding has a clear explanation in inquisitive semantics: truth-conditionally equivalent clauses may be associated with different propositional alternatives, each of which counts as a separate counterfactual assumption. Second, we show that our results contradict the common idea that the interpretation of a counterfactual involves minimizing change with respect to the actual state of affairs. We propose to replace the idea of minimal change by a distinction between foreground and background for a given counterfactual assumption: the background is held fixed in the counterfactual situation, while the foreground can be varied without any minimality constraint.

Two switches in the theory of counterfactuals