Is Causation Probabilistic? - eScholarship (original) (raw)

Is Causation Probabilistic? Caren A. Frosch (c.frosch@reading.ac.uk) Department of Psychology, University of Reading, RG6 6AL, UK P. N. Johnson-Laird (phil@princeton.edu) Department of Psychology, Princeton University, NJ 08540, USA Abstract One view of causation is deterministic: A causes B means that on any occasion in which A occurs, B occurs. An alternative view is that causation is probabilistic: it means that given A, the probability of B is greater than some criterion, such as the probability of B given not A. Evidence about the induction of causal relations cannot decide between these two accounts, and so we examined how people refute causal relations. Three experiments showed that they tend to be satisfied that a single counterexample of A and not-B refutes claims of the form, A causes B and A enables B. But, as a deterministic theory based on mental models predicted, when participants required more than one refutation they tended to do so for claims of the form, A enables ...