Not to denigrate the towering contributions of Pearl, but potential outcomes (what Pearl calls counterfactuals) were invented by Jerzy Neyman in 1920s, and much of the stuff was worked out by Don Rubin and company in the 1970s (to be fair, they didn’t talk to philosophers very much).
Of course Pearl contributed quite a bit himself, and is probably the best popularizer slash controversy magnet in the field, and has incredible scholarship and reach.
Still, if you are going to shit on academic philosophy for failing scholarship, at least do the scholarship homework yourself.
Also: did you read that paper? Are you sure Pearl et al. solved what they are talking about, or is even relevant? “Counterfactuals” is a big area.
Yes, I just mentioned that. The article I remember reading, which was definitely about Sobel and reverse Sobel sequences, did not contain anything that looked remotely problematic in a Pearlian framework.
As to the rest, you’re talking about giving credit for the answer and I’m talking about getting the right answer.
did not contain anything that looked remotely problematic in a Pearlian framework.
Maybe. Truth value being dependent on orderings for Sobel sequences is (a) weird (b) true according to our intuitions, apparently. So we need to figure out what’s going on (sounds like a problem for logic, really). Maybe you can have a Pearlian account of it—I am not sure myself, and I have not read such an account.
My point is this.
(a) If your complaint is about scholarship because you feel Pearl is relevant, which I base on you saying things like:
which talked a great deal about counterfactuals without once mentioning Judea Pearl
then that’s fine, but please get your own scholarship right.
(b) If your complaint is of the form: “why are you people wasting time, Pearl’s structural equations just immediately solve this,” then can you explain why, or point to a paper? How do you know this? Structural equations are not a panacea for every problem in causation and counterfactual reasoning.
...So, I found it ludicrous to call the reverse Sobel sequence false. I still basically feel that way after reading the article again, though I should say that the author gets around to a better account of the situation on page 12 of 29 (and on close inspection, Moss doesn’t really follow this by heading back to the same zombie-infested cul-de-sac. Not quite.) If the following statements come from different speakers, the second seems socially rude:
(3a) If Sophie had gone to the parade and been stuck behind a tall person, she would not have seen Pedro.
(3b) #But if Sophie had gone to the parade, she would have seen Pedro.
Since the author sometimes seems to treat these as made by one speaker, and the article is nominally about counterfactuals, I assume that both statements come from the same world-model or causal graph. I also assume that each comes from a human being, and not a logician or Omega, and thus we should take each as asserting a high probability. (The article only briefly considers someone saying, “Suppose that Sophie might not see Pedro, but that she will see Pedro,” which I don’t think we could make sense of without reading an explicitly conditional probability into the first half of the premise.) So with two different speakers, I see two credible ways to read (3b):
A. ‘Shut up.’
B. ‘You are altering the wrong node.’ (Because, eg, ‘Had Sophie gone to the parade, she would have looked for a good place to see it.’)
If it’s just B, then politeness would require doing more to rule out A and maybe explain why the speaker doesn’t care about the first counterfactual. Note that reversing their order (that is to say, un-reversing it) would give us what sounds like an invitation to keep talking. As Moss says, the “reply may be a non sequitur, perhaps even a little annoying.” But it doesn’t read as contempt or dismissal.
In the unlikely event that (3) has only one speaker and she isn’t disagreeing with anyone, then we have:
C. ‘The answer you get depends almost entirely on the question you ask. The whole point of counterfactuals is to screen off the causes that would ordinarily determine the (probability of the) node you change. Suppose we compute different answers when we ask, “What would the founding fathers say if they were alive today?” and “What would the founding fathers say if they had lived in our time?” Then the person who chooses the question probably knows the answer they want. Peripherally, I assert that the chance of Sophie getting stuck behind tall people would be too small for me to bother qualifying my statement.’
The main point of C seems obviously true as soon as I think about doing surgery on a causal graph. We can assume both counterfactuals are also true. (3) still seems “infelicitous” because as a rule of thumb it seems like a terrible way to express C, but that depends on the audience. If we rule out C as a reading, then the speaker’s statements could still be true, so I would probably call them “epistemically responsible”, but her goals would make no sense. She would sound like a more philosophical Gollum.
Now if you’re saying that C does not seem immediately clear to you when you think about doing counterfactual surgery, I will withdraw my original criticism. I would have many new criticisms, like the author assuming intuitions I may not share and analyzing common language while barely mentioning society or motive. There’s also what reads to me as mock-formalism, adding nothing to Pearl while distracting from the issues at hand. But the issue would at least warrant discussion, and I’d have to consider whether checking for references was a good test for me apply to the article.
Some people feel that the truth value should reasonably be changed under reversal. I think this might be because humans expect a social convention where info is given in order of relevance. So if (a) comes first, this is info that maybe the parade is crowded-by-default (e.g. preemption is the norm). This makes (b) implausible. If (b) comes first, this is info that we should expect to see people, by default. But this can still be preempted by an exceptional situation.
I don’t think this is even about counterfactuals, specifically, but about lack of commutativity of human utterances (most logics and mathematical languages allow you to commute propositions safely). I can think of all sorts of non-counterfactual versions of this where expectation-of-a-default/preemption create non-commutativity.
There exist cases where people gave “Pearlian accounts” for these types of things (see e.g. Halpern and Pearl’s paper on actual cause). But I think it requires quite a bit more work to make it go through than just “surgeries and causal graphs.” Their paper is quite long and involved.
Not to denigrate the towering contributions of Pearl, but potential outcomes (what Pearl calls counterfactuals) were invented by Jerzy Neyman in 1920s, and much of the stuff was worked out by Don Rubin and company in the 1970s (to be fair, they didn’t talk to philosophers very much).
Of course Pearl contributed quite a bit himself, and is probably the best popularizer slash controversy magnet in the field, and has incredible scholarship and reach.
Still, if you are going to shit on academic philosophy for failing scholarship, at least do the scholarship homework yourself.
Also: did you read that paper? Are you sure Pearl et al. solved what they are talking about, or is even relevant? “Counterfactuals” is a big area.
Yes, I just mentioned that. The article I remember reading, which was definitely about Sobel and reverse Sobel sequences, did not contain anything that looked remotely problematic in a Pearlian framework.
As to the rest, you’re talking about giving credit for the answer and I’m talking about getting the right answer.
Maybe. Truth value being dependent on orderings for Sobel sequences is (a) weird (b) true according to our intuitions, apparently. So we need to figure out what’s going on (sounds like a problem for logic, really). Maybe you can have a Pearlian account of it—I am not sure myself, and I have not read such an account.
My point is this.
(a) If your complaint is about scholarship because you feel Pearl is relevant, which I base on you saying things like:
then that’s fine, but please get your own scholarship right.
(b) If your complaint is of the form: “why are you people wasting time, Pearl’s structural equations just immediately solve this,” then can you explain why, or point to a paper? How do you know this? Structural equations are not a panacea for every problem in causation and counterfactual reasoning.
...So, I found it ludicrous to call the reverse Sobel sequence false. I still basically feel that way after reading the article again, though I should say that the author gets around to a better account of the situation on page 12 of 29 (and on close inspection, Moss doesn’t really follow this by heading back to the same zombie-infested cul-de-sac. Not quite.) If the following statements come from different speakers, the second seems socially rude:
Since the author sometimes seems to treat these as made by one speaker, and the article is nominally about counterfactuals, I assume that both statements come from the same world-model or causal graph. I also assume that each comes from a human being, and not a logician or Omega, and thus we should take each as asserting a high probability. (The article only briefly considers someone saying, “Suppose that Sophie might not see Pedro, but that she will see Pedro,” which I don’t think we could make sense of without reading an explicitly conditional probability into the first half of the premise.) So with two different speakers, I see two credible ways to read (3b):
A. ‘Shut up.’
B. ‘You are altering the wrong node.’ (Because, eg, ‘Had Sophie gone to the parade, she would have looked for a good place to see it.’)
If it’s just B, then politeness would require doing more to rule out A and maybe explain why the speaker doesn’t care about the first counterfactual. Note that reversing their order (that is to say, un-reversing it) would give us what sounds like an invitation to keep talking. As Moss says, the “reply may be a non sequitur, perhaps even a little annoying.” But it doesn’t read as contempt or dismissal.
In the unlikely event that (3) has only one speaker and she isn’t disagreeing with anyone, then we have:
C. ‘The answer you get depends almost entirely on the question you ask. The whole point of counterfactuals is to screen off the causes that would ordinarily determine the (probability of the) node you change. Suppose we compute different answers when we ask, “What would the founding fathers say if they were alive today?” and “What would the founding fathers say if they had lived in our time?” Then the person who chooses the question probably knows the answer they want. Peripherally, I assert that the chance of Sophie getting stuck behind tall people would be too small for me to bother qualifying my statement.’
The main point of C seems obviously true as soon as I think about doing surgery on a causal graph. We can assume both counterfactuals are also true. (3) still seems “infelicitous” because as a rule of thumb it seems like a terrible way to express C, but that depends on the audience. If we rule out C as a reading, then the speaker’s statements could still be true, so I would probably call them “epistemically responsible”, but her goals would make no sense. She would sound like a more philosophical Gollum.
Now if you’re saying that C does not seem immediately clear to you when you think about doing counterfactual surgery, I will withdraw my original criticism. I would have many new criticisms, like the author assuming intuitions I may not share and analyzing common language while barely mentioning society or motive. There’s also what reads to me as mock-formalism, adding nothing to Pearl while distracting from the issues at hand. But the issue would at least warrant discussion, and I’d have to consider whether checking for references was a good test for me apply to the article.
(having given this a bit of thought):
Some people feel that the truth value should reasonably be changed under reversal. I think this might be because humans expect a social convention where info is given in order of relevance. So if (a) comes first, this is info that maybe the parade is crowded-by-default (e.g. preemption is the norm). This makes (b) implausible. If (b) comes first, this is info that we should expect to see people, by default. But this can still be preempted by an exceptional situation.
I don’t think this is even about counterfactuals, specifically, but about lack of commutativity of human utterances (most logics and mathematical languages allow you to commute propositions safely). I can think of all sorts of non-counterfactual versions of this where expectation-of-a-default/preemption create non-commutativity.
There exist cases where people gave “Pearlian accounts” for these types of things (see e.g. Halpern and Pearl’s paper on actual cause). But I think it requires quite a bit more work to make it go through than just “surgeries and causal graphs.” Their paper is quite long and involved.