Sure. I have this sort of instinctive mental pushback because I think of counterfactuals primarily as useful tools for a planning agent, but I’m assuming that you don’t mean to deny this, and are just applying different emphasis.
Yeah, there’s definitely a tension between being a social-linguistic construct and being pragmatically useful (such as what you might need for a planning agent). I don’t completely know how to resolve this yet, but this post makes a start by noting that in additional to the social linguistic elements, the strength of the physical linkage between elements is important as well. My intuition is that there are a bunch of properties that make something more or less counterfactual and the social-linguistic conventions are about a) which of these properties are present when the problem is ambiguous b) which of these properties need to be satisfied before we accept a counterfactual as valid.
Sure. I have this sort of instinctive mental pushback because I think of counterfactuals primarily as useful tools for a planning agent, but I’m assuming that you don’t mean to deny this, and are just applying different emphasis.
Yeah, there’s definitely a tension between being a social-linguistic construct and being pragmatically useful (such as what you might need for a planning agent). I don’t completely know how to resolve this yet, but this post makes a start by noting that in additional to the social linguistic elements, the strength of the physical linkage between elements is important as well. My intuition is that there are a bunch of properties that make something more or less counterfactual and the social-linguistic conventions are about a) which of these properties are present when the problem is ambiguous b) which of these properties need to be satisfied before we accept a counterfactual as valid.