Proving Causation: Probability versus Belief

Proving Facts: Belief versus Probability

Belief in psychic ability and the misattribution hypothesis: a qualitative review.

This paper explores the notion that people who believe in psychic ability possess various psychological attributes that increase the likelihood of them misattributing paranormal causation to experiences that have a normal explanation. The paper discusses the structure and measurement of belief in psychic ability, then reviews the considerable body of work exploring the relationship between beli...

Causation, Prediction, and Accommodation

Causal inference is commonly viewed in two steps: (1) Represent the empirical data in terms of a probability distribution. (2) Draw causal conclusions from the conditional independencies exhibited in that distribution. I challenge this reconstruction by arguing that the empirical data are often better partitioned into different domains and represented by a separate probability distribution with...

Thinking as Evidence for the Probability of the Existence of a God: An Argument from Unnaturalness for Necessity

The objective of this article is to show that it is justified to assert that the existence of God is plausible, considering the fact that thinking itself is an immediate outcome (effect) of a thinker (cause). This idea may seem evident, but it is in fact challenged by certain claims of cognitive philosophers who aver that our knowledge of necessity and causation is, i...

The Experience of Mental Causation

Most of us have a very firm belief in mental causation; that is, we firmly believe that our own distinctly mental properties are causally efficacious in the production of our behavior. This belief is dominating in contemporary philosophy of mind as a part of the causal explanatory exclusion problem for non-reductive materialists. I do not discuss the exclusion problem; rather, I assess the conc...