Concrete Causation: About the Structures of Causal Knowledge (original) (raw)
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The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 2006
The paper builds on the basically Humean idea that A is a cause of B iff A and B both occur, A precedes B, and A raises the metaphysical or epistemic status of B given the obtaining circumstances. It argues that in pursuit of a theory of deterministic causation this 'status raising' is best explicated not in regularity or counterfactual terms, but in terms of ranking functions. On this basis, it constructs a rigorous theory of deterministic causation that successfully deals with cases of overdetermination and pre-emption. It finally indicates how the account's profound epistemic relativization induced by ranking theory can be undone. 1 Introduction 2 Variables, propositions, time 3 Induction first 4 Causation 5 Redundant causation 6 Objectivization 1 The major cycles have been produced by David Lewis himself. See Lewis ([1973b], [1986], [2000]). Hints to further cycles may be found there. 2 It is first presented in (Spohn [unpublished]). 3 See, e.g. the April issue of the Journal of Philosophy 97 (2000), or the collection by Collins et al. ([2004]). See also the many references therein, mostly referring to papers since 1995.
2006
Is the common cause principle merely one of a set of useful heuristics for dis-covering causal relations, or is it rather a piece of heavy duty metaphysics, capable of grounding the direction of causation itself? Since the princi-ple was introduced in Reichenbach’s groundbreaking work The Direction of Time (1956), there have been a series of attempts to pursue the latter program—to take the probabilistic relationships constitutive of the princi-ple of the common cause and use them to ground the direction of causation. These attempts have not all explicitly appealed to the principle as originally formulated; it has also appeared in the guise of independence conditions, counterfactual overdetermination, and, in the causal modelling literature, as the causal markov condition. In this paper, I identify a set of difficulties for grounding the asymmetry of causation on the principle and its descen-dents. The first difficulty, concerning what I call the vertical placement of causation, con...
The Metaphysics of Causal Models
Erkenntnis, 2008
This paper presents an attempt to integrate theories of causal processes -of the kind developed by Wesley Salmon and Phil Dowe -into a theory of causal models using Bayesian networks. We suggest that arcs in causal models must correspond to possible causal processes. Moreover, we suggest that when processes are rendered physically impossible by what occurs on distinct paths, the original model must be restricted by removing the relevant arc. These two techniques suffice to explain cases of late preëmption and other cases that have proved problematic for causal models.
2005
Is the common cause principle merely one of a set of useful heuristics for discovering causal relations, or is it rather a piece of heavy duty metaphysics, capable of grounding the direction of causation itself? Since the principle was introduced in Reichenbach’s groundbreaking work The Direction of Time (1956), there have been a series of attempts to pursue the latter program—to take the probabilistic relationships constitutive of the principle of the common cause and use them to ground the direction of causation. These attempts have not all explicitly appealed to the principle as originally formulated; it has also appeared in the guise of independence conditions, counterfactual overdetermination, and, in the causal modelling literature, as the causal markov condition. In this paper, I identify a set of difficulties for grounding the asymmetry of causation on the principle and its descendents. The first difficulty, concerning what I call the vertical placement of causation, consist...
Decision-Theoretic Foundations for Causal Reasoning
Arxiv preprint cs/9512104, 1995
We present a de nition of cause and e ect in terms of decision-theoretic primitives and thereby provide a principled foundation for causal reasoning. Our de nition departs from the traditional view of causation in that causal assertions may vary with the set of decisions available. ...