We have argued elsewhere that natural selection is not a cause of evolution, and that a resolution-of-forces (or vector addition) model does not provide us with a proper understanding of how natural selection combines with other evolutionary influences. These propositions have come in for criticism recently, and here we clarify and defend them. We do so within the broad framework of our own ‘hi...

This paper argues that functional states, and states defined in terms of them, cannot be causally relevant to the output or state transitions in terms of which those functional states are defined, or to intervening mechanisms or to anything to which their output is in turn causally relevant. Functional states therefore cannot be correctly invoked in what I call "simple causal explanations". Exp...

Clark Glymour is Alumni University Professor of Philosophy at Carnegie Mellon University, and Senior Research Scientist at the Institute for Human and Machine Cognition and John Pace Eminent Scholar at the University of West Florida. He is the author or coauthor of numerous articles and books, including “The Mind’s Arrows” (2001), “Computation, Causation and Discovery” (1999), and “Thinking Thi...

This survey presents some of the main principles involved in discovering causal relations. They belong to a large array of possible assumptions and conditions about causal relations, whose various combinations limit the possibilities of acquiring causal knowledge in different ways. How much and in what detail the causal structure can be discovered from what kinds of data depends on the particul...

Environmentalist concerns have moved centre stage in most major religious traditions of late and Buddhism is no exception to this rule. This paper shows that the canonical writings of Indic Buddhism possess elements that may harmonise with a //de facto// ecological consciousness. However, their basic attitude towards the causal process drastically reduces the possibility of developing an authen...

We present a general conceptualization of causal relations that pivots on the distinction between causality, a law-like relation between types of events, and causation, the actual causal relation that holds between individual events. This distinction finds its formal characterization and embedding within DOLCE, in terms of a number of dependences between (types of) quality changes. Finally an a...

A simple proof is given for the monotonicity of entropy and Fisher information associated to sums of i.i.d. random variables. The proof relies on a characterization of maximal correlation for partial sums due to Dembo, Kagan and Shepp.

In the realm of causativization, the traditional tension between explaining crosslinguistic variation while maintaining that a phenomenon has a common universal source can be stated specifically as follows: how can we explain the fact that if a certain type of verb causativizes in both languages A and B, the derived predicate usually has the same syntactic and semantic properties, while also ac...

Scatterplots have been in use for about two centuries, primarily for observing the relationship between two variables and commonly for supporting correlation analysis. In this paper, we report an empirical study that examines how humans’ perception of correlation using scatterplots relates to the Pearson’s product-moment correlation coefficient (PPMCC) – a commonly used statistical measure of c...

In geriatrics, driving cessation is addressed within the biopsychosocial model. This has broadened the scope of practitioners, not only in terms of assessing fitness to drive, but also by helping to maintain social engagements and provide support for transport transition. Causes can be addressed at different levels by adapting medication, improving physical health, modifying behaviour, adapting...