Causation and Causal Conditionals
نویسنده
چکیده
Causation is defined recursively: event e is the cause of condition φ in context c iff e is the only sufficient cause of φ in c, and removing e from c either removes φ from c or results in some other event causing φ. A logical language is then defined, in which it is possible to represent and reason about actual and counterfactual events in evolving partial contexts. Axiomatic theories of events and causation are given, and a formal pragmatics is defined, making it possible to reason formally about particular cases. By way of illustration, examples involving preemption and trumping preemption are given.
منابع مشابه
A causal theory of counterfactuals
" A Causal Theory of Counterfactuals " (forthcoming in Nous) I develop an account of counterfactual conditionals using " causal models " , and argue that this account is preferable to the currently standard account in terms of " similarity of possible worlds " due to David Lewis and Robert Stalnaker. I diagnose the attraction of counterfactual theories of causation, and argue that it is illusory.
متن کاملCausation and Conditionals in the Cognitive Science of Human Reasoning
This article traces the philosophical and psychological connections between causation and the conditional, if...then, across the two main paradigms used in conditional reasoning, the selection task and the conditional inference paradigm. It is argued that hypothesis testing in the selection task reflects the philosophical problems identified by Quine and Goodman for the material conditional int...
متن کاملGraphical models for causation, and the identification problem.
This article (which is mainly expository) sets up graphical models for causation, having a bit less than the usual complement of hypothetical counterfactuals. Assuming the invariance of error distributions may be essential for causal inference, but the errors themselves need not be invariant. Graphs can be interpreted using conditional distributions, so that we can better address connections be...
متن کاملInterpretations of Conditional and Causal Statements
Two experiments compared people’s interpretations of indicative conditionals (e.g., if the shape is blue, then it’s a square), subjunctive conditionals (e.g., if the shape were blue, then it would be a square), causation statements (e.g., the shape being blue causes it to be a square) and prevention statements (e.g., the shape being blue prevents it from being a square). In the first experiment...
متن کاملA Regularity Theoretic Approach to Actual Causation
The majority of the currently flourishing theories of actual (token-level) causation are located in a broadly counterfactual framework that draws on structural equations. In order to account for cases of symmetric overdeterminiation and preemption, these theories resort to rather intricate analytical tools, most of all, to what Hitchcock (2001) has labeled explicitly nonforetracking counterfact...
متن کامل