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Main Authors: Aguilera-Ventura, Carlos, Liu, Xinghan, Lorini, Emiliano, Rozplokhas, Dmitry
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.12972
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author Aguilera-Ventura, Carlos
Liu, Xinghan
Lorini, Emiliano
Rozplokhas, Dmitry
author_facet Aguilera-Ventura, Carlos
Liu, Xinghan
Lorini, Emiliano
Rozplokhas, Dmitry
contents We present a computationally grounded semantics for counterfactual conditionals in which i) the state in a model is decomposed into two elements: a propositional valuation and a causal base in propositional form that represents the causal information available at the state; and ii) the comparative similarity relation between states is computed from the states' two components. We show that, by means of our semantics, we can elegantly formalize the notion of actual cause without recurring to the primitive notion of intervention. Furthermore, we provide a succinct formulation of the model checking problem for a language of counterfactual conditionals in our semantics. We show that this problem is PSPACE-complete and provide a reduction of it into QBF that can be used for automatic verification of causal properties.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_12972
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A Non-Interventionist Approach to Causal Reasoning based on Lewisian Counterfactuals
Aguilera-Ventura, Carlos
Liu, Xinghan
Lorini, Emiliano
Rozplokhas, Dmitry
Logic in Computer Science
We present a computationally grounded semantics for counterfactual conditionals in which i) the state in a model is decomposed into two elements: a propositional valuation and a causal base in propositional form that represents the causal information available at the state; and ii) the comparative similarity relation between states is computed from the states' two components. We show that, by means of our semantics, we can elegantly formalize the notion of actual cause without recurring to the primitive notion of intervention. Furthermore, we provide a succinct formulation of the model checking problem for a language of counterfactual conditionals in our semantics. We show that this problem is PSPACE-complete and provide a reduction of it into QBF that can be used for automatic verification of causal properties.
title A Non-Interventionist Approach to Causal Reasoning based on Lewisian Counterfactuals
topic Logic in Computer Science
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.12972