Genomic Contextualism, Genetic Determinism, and Causal Models

Causal determinism in toddlers

Prior research has shown that children hold a belief in causal determinism the belief that all events are caused – by 4 years of age. In this study we investigate the developmental origins of this belief. We showed toddlers (24 months) a spontaneous or explained novel physical outcome (a toy that lit up either spontaneously or upon contact from an experimenter) and then showed them an additiona...

Genetic modification and genetic determinism

In this article we examine four objections to the genetic modification of human beings: the freedom argument, the giftedness argument, the authenticity argument, and the uniqueness argument. We then demonstrate that each of these arguments against genetic modification assumes a strong version of genetic determinism. Since these strong deterministic assumptions are false, the arguments against g...

Intervention, determinism, and the causal minimality condition

We clarify the status of the so-called causal minimality condition in the theory of causal Bayesian networks, which has received much attention in the recent literature on the epistemology of causation. In doing so, we argue that the condition is well motivated in the interventionist (or manipulability) account of causation, assuming the causal Markov condition which is essential to the semanti...

Genetic determinism or genetic discrimination?

Denotational, Causal, and Operational Determinism in Event Structures

Determinism is a theoretically and practically important concept in labelled transition systems and trees. We study its generalisation to event structures. It turns out that the result depends on what characterising property of tree determinism one sets out to generalise. We present three distinct notions of event structure determinism, and show that none of them shares all the pleasant propert...