• Korean Journal of Culture and Social Issue
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• v.8 no.2
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• pp.171-190
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• 2002

Counterfactual thinking refers to a mental simulation of "What might have been," a cognitive process of once-possible-but-unrealized alternatives to facts, Counterfactuals have been reported to produce intensive emotional experiences, specifically regret. The present research reviewed and tried to integrate the previous inconsistent findings in the view of functional value of counterfactuals. Social psychologists proposed that counterfactuals could be categorized into upward(thoughts of better alternatives) versus downward(thoughts of worse alternatives) and additive versus subtractive. Counterfactual processes are more likely to occur following negative or unexpected rather than positive expected outcome, consistent with the minimization-mobilization hypothesis. Downward counterfactuals serve affective functions(to make one feel better) through contrast effects. Upward counterfactuals serve preparative functions(to prepare and improve performance in the future similar tasks) through causal inferences. Also, upward counterfactuals have been demonstrated in several studies to be followed by success-related attitudes and intentions and actual performance improvement. Furthermore, in terms of regulatory focus, downward counterfactuals were related with the prevention focus(to maintain the current status and upward counterfactuals were related with the promotion focus(to improve the current status). Those findings from numerous studies support that counterfactuals are functional to serve human ongoing motives. In conclusion, applicability and limitation of functional value of counterfactual thinking were discussed.

• Language and Information
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• v.18 no.1
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• pp.1-32
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• 2014

This paper provides a corpus study on subjunctives in Korean in a way of comparative semantics. The whole arguments of this paper are bolstered by distributional evidence taken from naturally occurring bitexts (i.e. a bilingual corpus), in which one sentence in a language is aligned with one translation in the other language. Since previous studies regard past tense morphology as the main component to express irrealis and uncertainty, this paper accordingly checks out whether the past tense morpheme (e/a)ss in Korean is also responsible for conveying the meaning of subjunctives. My finding is that the past tense morpheme (e/a)ss is a sufficient condition for forming subjunctives in Korean. The current corpus study verifies that the past tense morpheme is not obligatorily used in present conditional counterfactuals in Korean, unlike English. Yet, if (e/a)ss is used and the antecedent denotes a present situation, the conditional sentence can only be interpreted as conveying counterfactuality. On the other hand, wish constructions in Korean, irrespective of the semantic tense, often contain the past tense morpheme. Hence, this work substantiates Iatridou (2000)'s theory of 'fake past tense' is applicable to Korean subjunctives. The present corpus study, additionally, reveals that a conditional marker telamyen is a component of expressing past counterfactuals in Korean.

• Journal of Preventive Medicine and Public Health
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• v.56 no.4
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• pp.303-311
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• 2023

Traditional mediation analysis, which relies on linear regression models, has faced criticism due to its limited suitability for cases involving different types of variables and complex covariates, such as interactions. This can result in unclear definitions of direct and indirect effects. As an alternative, causal mediation analysis using the counterfactual framework has been introduced to provide clearer definitions of direct and indirect effects while allowing for more flexible modeling methods. However, the conceptual understanding of this approach based on the counterfactual framework remains challenging for applied researchers. To address this issue, the present article was written to highlight and illustrate the definitions of causal estimands, including controlled direct effect, natural direct effect, and natural indirect effect, based on the key concept of nested counterfactuals. Furthermore, we recommend using 2 R packages, 'medflex' and 'mediation', to perform causal mediation analysis and provide public health examples. The article also offers caveats and guidelines for accurate interpretation of the results.

• East European & Balkan Studies
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• v.32
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• pp.257-281
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• 2012

Are the policies and strategies which weak and small states choose to follow for ensuring their's own security meaningless? Can the fate of weak states be guaranteed only by the neighboring benign strong states and be in certain international relations favoring for them? In this paper, to answer these questions, what kinds of security policies and foreign policies had small states chosen which were in the face of threats of great powers will be examined. Between the two world war, the series of event which took place in central and eastern European countries(CEEc) have been selected to examine the hypothesis and theories of international relations and foreign policies, and at the same time cited as examples of failed foreign policy and security strategy. During interwar periods, CEEc were the prime examples for examining what kind of policies and strategies had the small states chosen over the international relations in which the smalls had to struggle to survive between neighbouring the powers and between the hostiles. Furthermore, for the measures which the smalls had chosen had no effect when the great power threatened military to them, the main purpose of this paper is to examine what was the best choose to depend their survival. For this purpose, in this paper, several strategies which the smalls can choose and the counterfactuals, that is "if the smalls chosen another strategies, they could...", will be examined.

• Computers and Concrete
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• v.31 no.4
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• pp.277-292
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• 2023

Much of our experiments are designed to uncover the cause(s) and effect(s) behind a phenomenon (i.e., data generating mechanism) we happen to be interested in. Uncovering such relationships allows us to identify the true workings of a phenomenon and, most importantly, to realize and articulate a model to explore the phenomenon on hand and/or allow us to predict it accurately. Fundamentally, such models are likely to be derived via a causal approach (as opposed to an observational or empirical mean). In this approach, causal discovery is required to create a causal model, which can then be applied to infer the influence of interventions, and answer any hypothetical questions (i.e., in the form of What ifs? Etc.) that commonly used prediction- and statistical-based models may not be able to address. From this lens, this paper builds a case for causal discovery and causal inference and contrasts that against common machine learning approaches - all from a civil and structural engineering perspective. More specifically, this paper outlines the key principles of causality and the most commonly used algorithms and packages for causal discovery and causal inference. Finally, this paper also presents a series of examples and case studies of how causal concepts can be adopted for our domain.

• Korean Journal of Logic
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• v.17 no.1
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• pp.109-136
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• 2014

Every (semantic) antirealist accepts one or another form of verification principle. The principle has strong and weak forms, the strong form being highly counterintuitive but the weak one being more plausible. Understandably, antirealists have preferred the weak form of verification principle. Unfortunately, the socalled knowability paradox shows that those two forms are indeed equivalent. To solve this problem, Edgington suggests a yet new form of verification principle. Unfortunately, her new principle has its own difficulty. To overcome this difficulty, Edgington provides a new model of knowledge, according to which every true proposition is somehow associated with a known counterfactual conditional. In this paper, I shall argue that even this new model of knowledge confronts with an insurmountable problem. It is a well-known fact that, in the microscopic levels, some facts manage to occur despite very low physical chances. I will argue that the counterfactuals linked with those facts cannot be known due to the existence of epistemic defeaters. Hence, Edgington's knowledge model does not work in all cases.

• Korean Journal of Culture and Social Issue
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• v.18 no.3
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• pp.329-347
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• 2012

Criminal media such as dramas and movies are growing in popularity. However, the effects of criminal media as well as its psychological mechanism are not clearly examined. Based on social learning theory (Bandura, 1978), past studies showed that arrest and punishment to the criminal in media have a suppressing effect. The present research examined the ironic possibility that media coverage of punishment could increase the audience's criminal intention and proposed the mediating role of counterfactual thinking in the effect. We hypothesized that when punishment was depicted as accidental rather than unavoidable in media coverage, perceived high mutability and counterfactuals focusing on the accidental factors could clarify the ways to commit the crime without being caught and subsequently increase future criminal intention. In this study, 95 college students read a story of plagiarizing either no, accidental, or inevitable punishment, and later asked to report their intention to plagiarize. An ANCOVA with participants' own history of plagiarism as a covariate found that the intention of plagiarism in future was significantly different. The results showed that the intention of plagiarism in the accidental punishment condition was higher than that in the inevitable punishment condition. Further, the intention of plagiarism in the accidental punishment condition was the same level with non-punishment condition. The findings suggest that whether criminals are caught or not is not enough to reduce criminal intentions of audience, but how criminals are caught matters.