Counterfactuals

Counterfactuals are a form of common-sense nonmonotonic inference that has been of long-term interest to philosophers. In this paper, we begin by describing some of the impact counterfactuals can be expected to have in artificial intelligence, and by reviewing briefly some of the philosophical conclusions which have been drawn about them. We continue by presenting a formal description of counterfactual implication and discussing the issues involved in implementing it. Specific applications in the domains of planning and the automated diagnosis of hardware faults are considered, and we conclude by describing possible extensions to this work involving multi-valued logics and situation semantics.

Authors

• Matthew L. Ginsberg Andrew J. Parkes

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