Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The mental model theory postulates that reasoners build models of the situations described in premises, and that each model represents a possibility. The present paper proposes that causal relations, such as A causes B and A allows B. have meanings that concern only possibilities and a temporal constraint that B cannot precede A. This theory predicts that causes and enabling conditions differ in meanings, contrary to a long tradition in philosophy and psychology that they are logically indistinguishable. It also predicts that individuals should reason about causation on the basis of mental models rather than on fully explicit models. Three experiments corroborated these predictions.