2023
DOI: 10.31234/osf.io/xv8hf
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Causation, Meaning, and Communication

Abstract: The words we use to describe what happened shape the story a listener imagines. How do speakers choose what causal expression to use? How does that impact what listeners infer about what happened? In this paper, we develop a computational model of how people use the causal expressions "caused", "enabled", "affected", and "made no difference". The model first builds a causal representation of what happened. By running counterfactual simulations, the model computes causal aspects that capture the different ways … Show more

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Cited by 1 publication
(2 citation statements)
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“…By considering multiple aspects of causation, the CSM also has a natural way of differentiating between causal expressions such as "caused", "enabled", and "affected" (87,104,98,104,43,19,15). Instead of using force-vectors to define what each expression means (see Figure 2b, Box 1; 121), the CSM uses logical combinations of counterfactual contrasts (10,11). Accordingly, "affected" means that a candidate was either a whether-cause or a how-cause (or both), "enabled" means that it was a whether-cause, and "caused" means that it was both a whether-cause and a how-cause.…”
Section: What Happens When There Are Multiple Candidate Causes?mentioning
confidence: 99%
See 1 more Smart Citation
“…By considering multiple aspects of causation, the CSM also has a natural way of differentiating between causal expressions such as "caused", "enabled", and "affected" (87,104,98,104,43,19,15). Instead of using force-vectors to define what each expression means (see Figure 2b, Box 1; 121), the CSM uses logical combinations of counterfactual contrasts (10,11). Accordingly, "affected" means that a candidate was either a whether-cause or a how-cause (or both), "enabled" means that it was a whether-cause, and "caused" means that it was both a whether-cause and a how-cause.…”
Section: What Happens When There Are Multiple Candidate Causes?mentioning
confidence: 99%
“…Accordingly, "affected" means that a candidate was either a whether-cause or a how-cause (or both), "enabled" means that it was a whether-cause, and "caused" means that it was both a whether-cause and a how-cause. By combining this new semantics of causal expressions with a model of pragmatic inference (26,31), the CSM accurately captured which causal expressions participants selected as the best description of what happened, and what inferences they made about what happened based on a given causal expression (10).…”
Section: What Happens When There Are Multiple Candidate Causes?mentioning
confidence: 99%