Past studies on children’s counterfactual reasoning have been mainly centered around the two following questions: (1) Can children reason counterfactually? (2) At what age does counterfactual reasoning arise? (Rafetseder et al 2013, Nyhout and Ganea 2019)
In the present study, I explore another aspect of counterfactual reasoning – When children reason counterfactually, what is the nature of the changes they allow from the actual world? To answer this question, I propose a novel experimental study, which utilizes a causal-networks based take on Lewis’s similarity principle, and analyze children’s responses to three counterfactual scenarios. I compare children’s responses to these three scenarios to responses from an adult norming sample, and show that when children’s responses deviate from those of adults, they demonstrate a fairly consistent strategy in their choice of counterfactual worlds.
Within the causal models approach, following Hiddleston (2005) and Pearl (2009), similarity to the actual world is determined by the maintenance of non-antecedent, causally independent facts within a given scenario. In addition, mature counterfactual reasoning requires maintenance of the laws of a given scenario. It is therefore possible that when children’s responses are non-adult-like, children demonstrate flexibility in terms of changes to non-antecedent facts, or flexibility in the maintenance of the laws of a scenario. In the current study, I provide evidence that the former is the case, and argue that children’s non-adult-like responses are due to a lack of a parsimonious approach in their treatment of facts.