What are you trying to get/do? I'm asking very seriously, as I can't quite tell where we land between philosophy of language, human behaviour and cognition, AI architecture or some unification problem of them.
From philosophy of language perspective, I personally like to argue that hypotheticals in past tense are just wrong, but are used in the same way present and future tense versions are: expressing internal belief about how causality will play out for the sake of aligning them in a group.
I'm aware of other approaches, but that has a convenient property of bringing us to human (or biological as far as we know it) cognition, where mental models need to be expressed to get some value from social systems providing feedback - and a very fast, although limited in ways that create whole branches of our societies, way to do it is talking about causality in stories. Here counterfactuals are a special form of such stories - as a side note, I would be willing to argue that them being useful and 'entertaining' (as in 'aesthetically pleasing, but not necessarily beautiful') is a related phenomena.
I think both aspects can inform AI design, depending on where you want to put the 'AI' in the whole process. I'm not sure I'm optimistic about unification theory ;)
What are you trying to get/do? I'm asking very seriously, as I can't quite tell where we land between philosophy of language, human behaviour and cognition, AI architecture or some unification problem of them.
From philosophy of language perspective, I personally like to argue that hypotheticals in past tense are just wrong, but are used in the same way present and future tense versions are: expressing internal belief about how causality will play out for the sake of aligning them in a group.
I'm aware of other approaches, but that has a convenient property of bringing us to human (or biological as far as we know it) cognition, where mental models need to be expressed to get some value from social systems providing feedback - and a very fast, although limited in ways that create whole branches of our societies, way to do it is talking about causality in stories. Here counterfactuals are a special form of such stories - as a side note, I would be willing to argue that them being useful and 'entertaining' (as in 'aesthetically pleasing, but not necessarily beautiful') is a related phenomena.
I think both aspects can inform AI design, depending on where you want to put the 'AI' in the whole process. I'm not sure I'm optimistic about unification theory ;)