Actual Causation and the Challenge of Purpose

the evaluation of language related engagment and task related engagment with the purpose of investigating the effect of metatalk and task typology

abstract while task-based instruction is considered as the most effective way to learn a language in the related literature, it is oversimplified on various grounds. different variables may affect how students are engaged with not only the language but also with the task itself. the present study was conducted to investigate language and task related engagement on the basis of the task typolog...

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...

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...

Actual causation and the art of modeling

We look more carefully at the modeling of causality using structural equations. It is clear that the structural equations can have a major impact on the conclusions we draw about causality. In particular, the choice of variables and their values can also have a significant impact on causality. These choices are, to some extent, subjective. We consider what counts as an appropriate choice. More ...

Actual Causation: Definitions and Principles