Cognitive and Linguistic Sciences, Brown UniversityDepartment of Psychology, University College, London.
Cogn Sci. 2005 Jan 2;29(1):5-39. doi: 10.1207/s15516709cog2901_2.
A normative framework for modeling causal and counterfactual reasoning has been proposed by Spirtes, Glymour, and Scheines (1993; cf. Pearl, 2000). The framework takes as fundamental that reasoning from observation and intervention differ. Intervention includes actual manipulation as well as counterfactual manipulation of a model via thought. To represent intervention, Pearl employed the do operator that simplifies the structure of a causal model by disconnecting an intervened-on variable from its normal causes. Construing the do operator as a psychological function affords predictions about how people reason when asked counterfactual questions about causal relations that we refer to as undoing, a family of effects that derive from the claim that intervened-on variables become independent of their normal causes. Six studies support the prediction for causal (A causes B) arguments but not consistently for parallel conditional (if A then B) ones. Two of the studies show that effects are treated as diagnostic when their values are observed but nondiagnostic when they are intervened on. These results cannot be explained by theories that do not distinguish interventions from other sorts of events.
斯皮尔斯、格里莫尔和谢因斯（1993 年；参见珀尔，2000 年）提出了一个用于因果和反事实推理建模的规范框架。该框架的基本前提是观察推理和干预推理是不同的。干预包括实际操作以及通过思考对模型进行反事实操作。为了表示干预，Pearl 使用了 do 运算符，通过将被干预的变量与其正常原因断开连接，简化了因果模型的结构。将 do 运算符理解为一种心理函数，可以预测当人们被问及关于因果关系的反事实问题时，他们是如何推理的，我们称之为撤销，这是一系列效应，源于被干预的变量与其正常原因变得独立的说法。六项研究支持了对因果（A 导致 B）论点的预测，但对平行条件（如果 A 那么 B）论点的预测并不一致。其中两项研究表明，当观察到其值时，效应被视为诊断性的，但当对其进行干预时，效应则不具有诊断性。这些结果不能用不区分干预和其他类型事件的理论来解释。
