Abstract
Primary goal of this paper is to show that counterfactual reasoning,
as many other kinds of common sense reasoning, can be studied and
analyzed through what we can call a cognitive approach, that
represents knowledge as structured and partitioned into different
domains, everyone of which has a specific theory, but can exchange
data and information with some of the others. Along these lines, we
are going to show that a kind of ``counterfactual attitude'' is
pervasive in a lot of forms of common sense reasoning, as in
theories of action, beliefs/intentions ascription, cooperative and
antagonistic situations, communication acts. The second purpose of
the paper is to give a reading of counterfactual reasoning as a
specific kind of contextual reasoning, this latter interpreted
according to the theory of MultiContext Systems developed by Fausto
Giunchiglia and his group.