The use of design descriptions in automated diagnosis
Artificial Intelligence - Special volume on qualitative reasoning about physical systems
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Counterfactuals arc a form of commonsense non-monotonic inference that has been of long-term interest to philosophers. In this paper, we begin by describing some of the impact counterfactuals can be exported to have in artificial intelligence, and by reviewing briefly some of the philosophical conclusions which have been drawn about them. Philosophers have noted that the content of any particular counterfactual is in part context-dependent; we present a formal description of counterfactuals that is formally identical to the "possible worlds" interpretation due to David Lewis and which allows us to encode this context-dependent information clearly in the choice of a sublanguage of the logical language in which we are working. Finally, we examine the application of our ideas in the domain of automated diagnosis of hardware faults.