Counterfactual Availability and Causal Judgment

In this paper I survey the psychological literature on counterfactual availability. While humans have the capacity to engage in counterfactual reasoning, we do not do so indiscriminately. Rather, we tend to entertain specific kinds of counterfactual hypotheses. Psychologists have studied the sorts of factors that influence the counterfactuals we entertain. I argue that we can expect these factors to exert a related influence on causal judgments, and connect this thesis with a number of discussions from the philosophical literature on causation