Counterfactual Thinking

... Comments on good and bad luck were identified by searching all documents for occurrences of the Norwegian equivalents of good luck/bad luck, lucky/unlucky, fortunate/unfortunate, and fortunately/ unfortunately.1 The contexts of these terms – the sen-tences in which they ...

Counterfactual thinking is often assumed to depend on closeness between what is and what might have been, following a principle of minimal mutations of reality. Yet when people are asked to describe autobiographical incidents that “might” have been different, they typically report situations that could have had opposite rather than just different outcomes (Experiment 1). In four subsequent studies participants

Subjective experiences of good or bad luck appear to depend upon downward or upward comparisons with close counterfactuals. People exposed to disasters have both options: They were at the wrong place at the wrong time, but their fate could in many cases have been worse; so in a sense, they are unlucky victims, but lucky survivors. Interviews with 85 Norwegian

(Deadline for 300-word abstracts: 17 April 2017)

This is a call for participation for Off the Lip 2017: Transdisciplinary Approaches to Cognitive Innovation. This year's theme is "Cognitive Innovation and Displacement".

The challenges facing society today demand innovative approaches, creative solutions and wider resonances that can only be obtained by drawing on multiple perspectives. Off the Lip, in its third edition, integrates research in art, science, humanities, and engineering in a radically transdisciplinary event that actively engages the business community and the public at large. We invite you to submit your work and join us in CogNovo's latest, excitingly diverse ideas exchange. Based at the Cognition Intitute at Plymouth University (UK), CogNovo is a multidisciplinary collaborative programme linking the sciences, arts and humanities. Through the notion of cognitive innovation, we approach creativity as a bootstrapping cognitive process not exclusively concerned with conscious human thought and action but with a broader conceptualisation of adaptive behaviour that is intrinsic to our engagement with the world.

Off the Lip 2017 welcomes submissions in topics related to cognitive innovation and creativity. In recognition of the profound changes facing society today, we especially welcome submissions around the theme of Cognitive Innovation and Displacement. Topics include, but are not limited to, the following:

Technologies of displacement, displaced technologies
* Robot creativity and the second machine age
* Competing, collaborating, or co-creating with machines
* Make it work: jugaad and practices of hacking
* Mobile, ubiquitous, and pervasive computing

Cognitive innovation in the context of recent world developments
* Nudging or manipulating? Cognitive interventions for behavioral change
* Speculative and critical design
* Reimagining and re-engaging with the commons
* Cognitive innovations in assessment, measurement, and observation

Displacements in cognition
* Making up your mind: Perceptual and creative processes as displacements of reality
* Serendipities as displaced thoughts
* Creativity and cognition in the displaced body
* Counterfactual thinking and displacing facts
* Creativity as improvisation
* Cognitive disruptions and re/placing habit

We invite proposals for contributions such as (but not limited to) the following:
- Presentations
- Posters
- Workshops
- Exhibits
- Demos

Off the Lip 2017 (16-18 August) will be closely followed by the Balance-Unbalance 2017 conference (21-23 August). We invite you to spend the intervening weekend in the beautiful coastal area of Cornwall or the dramatic Dartmoor area before attending Balance-Unbalance, whose theme (A Sense of Place: Art x Science x Technology = Environment / Responsibility) is closely linked to that of Off the Lip.

The epistemology of modality is gradually coming to play a central role in general discussions about modality. This paper is a contribution in this direction, in particular I draw a comparison between Lewis's Modal realism and Timothy Wil-liamson's recent account of modality in terms of counterfactual thinking. In order to have criteria of evaluation, I also formulate four requirements which are supposed to be met by any theory of modality to be epistemologically adequate.