Actual Causation and Compositionality

Cost and Actual Causation

I propose the purpose our concept of actual causation serves is minimizing various cost in intervention practice. Actual causation has three features: non-redundant sufficiency, continuity and abnormality; these features correspond to the minimization of exploitative cost, exploratory cost and risk cost in intervention practice. Incorporating these three features, a definition of actual causati...

Actual Causation: Definitions and Principles

Actual Causation : A Stone Soup

We argue that current discussions of criteria for actual causation are ill-posed in several respects. (1) The methodology of current discussions is by induction from intuitions about an infinitesimal fraction of the possible examples and counterexamples; (2) novel problem cases occur when more variables are considered; (3) as deployed in discussions of actual causation, “neuron diagrams” and ca...

Actual causation in CP-logic

Given a causal model of some domain and a particular story that has taken place in this domain, the problem of actual causation is deciding which of the possible causes for some effect actually caused it. One of the most influential approaches to this problem has been developed by Halpern and Pearl in the context of structural models. In this paper, I argue that this is actually not the best se...

The Transitivity and Asymmetry of Actual Causation

The counterfactual tradition to defining actual causation has come a long way since Lewis started it off. However there are still important open problems that need to be solved. One of them is the (in)transitivity of causation. Endorsing transitivity was a major source of trouble for the approach taken by Lewis, which is why currently most approaches reject it. But transitivity has never lost i...