For nearly a century, investigators in the social sciences have used regression models to deduce cause-and-effect relationships from patterns of association. Path models and automated search procedures are more recent developments. In my view, this enterprise has not been successful. The models tend to neglect the difficulties in establishing causal relations, and the mathematical complexities ...

Recognition of causality is important to achieve natural language discourse understanding. Previous approaches rely on shallow linguistic features. In this work, we propose to identify causality in verbnoun pairs by exploiting deeper semantics of nouns and verbs. Particularly, we acquire and employ three novel types of knowledge: (1) semantic classes of nouns with a high and low tendency to enc...

What conception of causation is at work in the law? I argue that the law implicitly relies on a contrastive conception. In a liability case where the defendant’s breach of duty must be shown to have caused the plaintiff’s damages, it is not enough to consider what would have happened if the cause had not occurred—the law instructs us to look to a specific replacement for the cause, which in thi...

Our ordinary causal concept seems to fit poorly with how our best physics describes the world. We think of causation as a time-asymmetric dependence relation between relatively local events. Yet fundamental physics describes the world in terms of dynamical laws that are, possible small exceptions aside, time symmetric and that relate global time slices. My goal in this paper is to show why we a...

Law360, New York (April 30, 2008) -There is fairly widespread agreement that proof of causation in a toxic tort case requires three steps: first, the plaintiff must prove that the alleged toxin can cause an injury of the sort he alleges (general causation); second, the plaintiff must prove that he was exposed to the toxin in amounts sufficient to have caused his injury; and third, the plaintiff...

Given empirical evidence for the dependence of an outcome variable on an exposure variable, we can typically only provide bounds for the “probability of causation” in the case of an individual who has developed the outcome after being exposed. We show how these bounds can be adapted or improved if further information becomes available. In addition to reviewing existing work on this topic, we pr...

People’s concept of free will is often assumed to be incompatible with the deterministic, scientific model of the universe. Indeed, many scholars treat the folk concept of free will as assuming a special form of nondeterministic causation, possibly the notion of uncaused causes. However, little work to date has directly probed individuals’ beliefs about what it means to have free will. The pres...

High accident rate in construction is a universal problem which needs to be tackled by all parties concerned (Poon et al. 2008). Although in the last decade there was a downward trend in construction accidents in many places such as Hong Kong due to implementation of numerous safety schemes, improvement in construction accident records is still necessary (Figs. 2.1, 2.2). A previous research st...