Causation and Explanation

Hierarchy, causation and explanation: ubiquity, locality and pluralism.

The ubiquity of top-down causal explanations within and across the sciences is prima facie evidence for the existence of top-down causation. Much debate has been focused on whether top-down causation is coherent or in conflict with reductionism. Less attention has been given to the question of whether these representations of hierarchical relations pick out a single, common hierarchy. A negativ...

The Concept of Causation in Newton’s Mechanical and Optical Work

In this essay the authors explore the nature of efficient causal explanation in Newton’s Principia and The Opticks. It is argued that: (1) In the dynamical explanations of the Principia, Newton treats the phenomena under study as cases of Hall’s second kind of atypical causation. The underlying concept of causation is therefore a purely interventionist one. (2) In the descriptions of his optica...

Theories of Causation and Explanation: Necessarily True or Domain-Specific?

The Probability of Causal Explanation

We present a probabilistic theory of causal explanations, which integrates probabilistic and causal knowledge. Unlike most other approaches where a causal explanation is a hypothesis that one or more causative events occurred , we deene an explanation of a set of observations to be the occurrence of a chain of causation events. These causation events constitute a scenario where all the observat...

A DSEL for Studying and Explaining Causation

We present a domain-specific embedded language (DSEL) in Haskell that supports the philosophical study and practical explanation of causation. The language provides constructs for modeling situations comprised of events and functions for reliably determining the complex causal relationships that emerge between these events. It enables the creation of visual explanations of these causal relation...