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...

The structure of this article is as follows: first, I will give a general sketch of the most important contemporary approaches to causation. Next, in the second part, I will briefly discuss the historical development of the concept of cause; I will show that the history of the concept of cause reveals a complex evolution marked by two decisive milestones: (I) the Aristotelian (-scholastic) Conc...

According to common judicial standard, judgment in favor of plaintii should be made if and only if it is \more probable than not" that the defendant's action was the cause for the plaintii's damage (or death). This paper provides formal semantics, based on structural models of counterfactuals, for the probability that event x was a necessary or suucient cause (or both) of another event y. The p...

This paper is divided into two parts. In part one I apply a formal method for the establishment of cause-relations between events to cases involving manner modification. In the second part I argue that the status of a manner adverb with regard to its role in a causeconsequence sequent does not play a role for its formal representation at the sentential level. Instead, it influences a sentence’s...