∗Forthcoming in a Minds and Machines special issue on “Causality, Uncertainty and Ignorance”. Thanks to audiences at Konstanz and Sydney, to the Russellian Society Discussion Group, and (original) (raw)
Related papers
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...
In one of its most basic and informal shapes, the principle of the common cause states that any surprising correlation between two factors which are believed not to directly influence one another is due to their (possibly hidden) common cause. In the history of philosophy it is easy to find examples of similar reasoning; one needs to look no further than the mind-body problem. There is a truly astonishing correlation between our thoughts of the ``I want to wave my hand'' sort and the movements of our hands of the waving sort. A venerable solution to this quandary is that of invoking God as the common cause (which was the road taken e.g. by Malebranche). We can perhaps look for similar causal intuitions in Mill's "System of Logic". From the fifth Canon of Induction it follows that a concomitant variation in two phenomena of which none is a cause of the other is a sign of a connection between the two by ``some fact of causation''. Mill begins his exposition of the Canon by referring to the case in which this fact is the phenomena being two effects of a common cause (Vol.\ I, Book III, Chapter VIII of Mill (1868). Bertrand Russell is on a similar track when he writes of ``identity of structure'' leading to ``the assumption of a common causal origin'' (Russell (2009), p. 409). We, however, will be concerned with an idea which possesses a probabilistic formulation. It was introduced, in the form of a general principle, by Hans Reichenbach in his posthumously published book "The Direction of Time". The central notion of the principle in Reichenbach's formulation, and of the current essay, is that of screening off: two correlated events are screened off by a third event if conditioning on the third event makes them probabilistically independent. Reichenbach's principle marks also the beginning of a new field of philosophy: namely, that of ``probabilistic causality''. The main results of this work are presented in chapters 6 and 7. For the most part, the current essay can be seen as an effort at checking how far one can go with the purely statistical notions revolving around Reichenbach's idea of common cause. In short, the answer is ``surprisingly far''; in some classes of probability spaces all correlations between ``interesting'' (e.g. ``logically independent'', this will be formally defined in chapter 6) events possess explanations of such sort. However, this fact lends itself to opposing interpretations; more on that in the conclusion. Chapters 6 and 7 contain mathematical results concerning these issues. The screening-off condition requires an equality of a probabilistic nature to hold; chapter 8 is a short discussion of slightly weakened versions of the condition, which hold if the sides of the above mentioned equality differ to a small degree. In chapter 2, after some mathematical preliminaries, we study the various formulations of the principle which might be said to stem from the original idea of Reichenbach. We also examine a few of the most salient counterarguments, which undermine at least some of the formulations. Chapter 3 is of a formal nature, dealing with various probabilistic notions which can be thought of as generalizations of Reichenbach's concept of common cause. The next chapter concerns the relationship between the idea of common causal explanation and the Bell inequalities. In chapter 5 we briefly present the form of Reichenbach's principle which can be found in the field of representing causal structures by means of directed acyclic graphs.
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.
Concrete Causation: About the Structures of Causal Knowledge
2012
Concrete Causation centers about theories of causation, their interpretation, and their embedding in metaphysical-ontological questions, as well as the application of such theories in the context of science and decision theory. The dissertation is divided into four chapters, that firstly undertake the historical-systematic localization of central problems (chapter 1) to then give a rendition of the concepts and the formalisms underlying David Lewis' and Judea Pearl's theories (chapter 2). After philosophically motivated conceptual deliberations Pearl's mathematical-technical framework is drawn on for an epistemic interpretation and for emphasizing the knowledge-organizing aspect of causality in an extension of the interventionist Bayes net account of causation (chapter 3). Integrating causal and non-causal knowledge in unified structures ultimately leads to an approach towards solving problems of (causal) decision theory and at the same time facilitates the representation of logical-mathematical, synonymical, as well as reductive relationships in efficiently structured, operational nets of belief propagation (chapter 4).
The principle of common cause and indeterminism: a review
2008
Abstract We offer a review of some of the most influential views on the status of Reichenbach's Principle of the Common Cause (PCC) for genuinely indeterministic systems. We first argue that the PCC is properly a conjunction of two distinct claims, one metaphysical and another methodological. Both claims can and have been contested in the literature, but here we simply assume that the metaphysical claim is correct, in order to focus our analysis on the status of the methodological claim.
2006), Causation: An Alternative
2016
Abstract: The paper builds on the basically Humean general idea that A is a cause of B iff A and B both occur, A precedes B, and A raises the metaphysical or epis-temic 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 regu-larity 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 preemption. It finally indicates how the account’s
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.
Probabilistic theories [of causality]
This chapter provides an overview of a range of probabilistic theories of causality, including those of Reichenbach, Good and Suppes, and the contemporary causal net approach. It discusses two key problems for probabilistic accounts: counterexamples to these theories and their failure to account for the relationship between causality and mechanisms. It is argued that to overcome the problems, an epistemic theory of causality is required.