Counterfactual Reasoning via Grounded Distance
Carlos Aguilera-Ventura, Andreas Herzig, Xinghan Liu, Emiliano Lorini · 2023
Conditional logics are usually interpreted in terms of closest world and minimal change. It relies on a measure of distance between worlds which is defined abstractly, i.e. as an element of the model. The typical example of a concrete measure in literature is the Hamming distance. We show that given countably infinite atomic propositions in the language, Hamming distance is not merely an example, but grounded for two arguably most important conditional logics, Lewis' VC and VCU. That means, a formula is satisfied in a VC (resp. VCU) model, if and only if it is satisfied in a VC (resp. VCU) model whose distance between worlds is Hammingian.