The Effects of Causal Uncertainty, Causal Importance, and Initial Attitude on Attention to Causal Persuasive Arguments

Singular and General Causal Arguments

In two studies we examined arguments for singular and general causal claims. The first study, a content analysis of newspaper articles, revealed characteristic distributions for mechanistic, statistical, and counterfactual argumentations in singular and general problems. In a second experimental study, subjects formulated arguments from different perspectives on general and singular problems. T...

Running head : Causal Belief Integration Under Uncertainty Causal Belief Integration : The Representation of Uncertainty , Confidence , and Contradiction in Causal

Causal reasoning is a critical part of everyday cognition. We ask how people reason about causes when faced with inconsistent sources of knowledge. Assuming that causal models usually arise from multiple sources of information, we demonstrate how many such models are likely to exhibit contradictions. We propose a model that represents the uncertainty associated with each component of a causal m...

On Identifying Causal Effects

Arguments Using Ontological and Causal Knowledge

We explore an approach to reasoning about causes via argumentation. We consider a causal model for a physical system, and we look for arguments about facts. Some arguments are meant to provide explanations of facts whereas some challenge these explanations and so on. At the root of argumentation here, are causal links ({A1, · · · , An} causes B) and also ontological links (c1 is a c2). We intro...

Design of Information Graphics for Causal Arguments

In this paper we analyze some information graphic design techniques used to help present causal arguments in human-authored articles on science and technology intended for an audience that may include non-scientists. In particular, our focus is on design techniques used to argue for or against causal relationships. We represent the causal claims of the arguments in the notation of qualitative p...