Team Semantics for Interventionist Counterfactuals: Observations vs. Interventions.

Team semantics is a highly general framework for logics which describe dependencies and independencies among variables. Typically, the (in)dependencies considered in this context are properties of sets of configurations or data records. We show how team semantics can be further generalized to suppor...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of Philosophical Logic Vol. 50; no. 3; pp. 471 - 522
Main Authors: Barbero, Fausto, Sandu, Gabriel
Format: Article
Published: Springer Nature Jun2021
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Online Access:View this record in EBSCOhost
Description
Summary:Team semantics is a highly general framework for logics which describe dependencies and independencies among variables. Typically, the (in)dependencies considered in this context are properties of sets of configurations or data records. We show how team semantics can be further generalized to support languages for the discussion of interventionist counterfactuals and causal dependencies, such as those that arise in manipulationist theories of causation (Pearl, Hitchcock, Woodward, among others). We show that the "causal teams" we introduce in the present paper can be used for modelling some classical counterfactual scenarios which are not captured by the usual causal models. We then analyse the basic properties of our counterfactual languages and discuss extensively the differences with respect to the Lewisian tradition.