Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Is it reasonable to draw temporal conclusions from omissive causal assertions? For example, if you learn that not chargingyour phone caused it to die, is it sensible to infer that your failure to charge your phone occurred before it died? Theconclusion seems intuitive, but no theory of causal reasoning explains how reasoners make the inference other than a recentproposal by Khemlani and colleagues (2018a). We present that theory and describe its consequences. If people conceiveof omissions as non-events, i.e., events unmoored in space and time, they might refrain from drawing conclusions whenasked whether an omissive cause precedes its effect. Two experiments speak against these predictions of the non-eventview and in favor of a view that omissive causation imposes temporal constraints on events and their effects. We concludeby considering whether drawing a temporal conclusion from an omissive cause constitutes a reasoning error.