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  1. What does causality have to do with necessity?Helen Steward - 2022 - Synthese 200 (2):1-25.
    In her ‘Causality and Determination’, Anscombe argues for the strong thesis that despite centuries of philosophical assumption to the contrary, the supposition that causality and necessity have something essential to do with one another is baseless. In this paper, I assess Anscombe’s arguments and endorse her conclusion. I then attempt to argue that her arguments remain highly relevant today, despite the fact that most popular general views of causation today are firmly probabilistic in orientation and thus show no trace of (...)
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  • Causal Responsibility and Robust Causation.Guy Grinfeld, David Lagnado, Tobias Gerstenberg, James F. Woodward & Marius Usher - 2020 - Frontiers in Psychology 11:1069.
    How do people judge the degree of causal responsibility that an agent has for the outcomes of her actions? We show that a relatively unexplored factor -- the robustness of the causal chain linking the agent’s action and the outcome -- influences judgments of causal responsibility of the agent. In three experiments, we vary robustness by manipulating the number of background circumstances under which the action causes the effect, and find that causal responsibility judgments increase with robustness. In the first (...)
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  • Normality and actual causal strength.Thomas F. Icard, Jonathan F. Kominsky & Joshua Knobe - 2017 - Cognition 161 (C):80-93.
    Existing research suggests that people's judgments of actual causation can be influenced by the degree to which they regard certain events as normal. We develop an explanation for this phenomenon that draws on standard tools from the literature on graphical causal models and, in particular, on the idea of probabilistic sampling. Using these tools, we propose a new measure of actual causal strength. This measure accurately captures three effects of normality on causal judgment that have been observed in existing studies. (...)
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  • A rational analysis of the selection task as optimal data selection.Mike Oaksford & Nick Chater - 1994 - Psychological Review 101 (4):608-631.
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  • Constraints and nonconstraints in causal learning: Reply to White (2005) and to Luhmann and Ahn (2005).Patricia W. Cheng & Laura R. Novick - 2005 - Psychological Review 112 (3):694-706.
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  • Postscript.Patricia W. Cheng & Laura R. Novick - 2005 - Psychological Review 112 (3):706-707.
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  • A Theory of Causal Learning in Children: Causal Maps and Bayes Nets.Alison Gopnik, Clark Glymour, Laura Schulz, Tamar Kushnir & David Danks - 2004 - Psychological Review 111 (1):3-32.
    We propose that children employ specialized cognitive systems that allow them to recover an accurate “causal map” of the world: an abstract, coherent, learned representation of the causal relations among events. This kind of knowledge can be perspicuously understood in terms of the formalism of directed graphical causal models, or “Bayes nets”. Children’s causal learning and inference may involve computations similar to those for learning causal Bayes nets and for predicting with them. Experimental results suggest that 2- to 4-year-old children (...)
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  • The Oxford Handbook of Causal Reasoning.Michael Waldmann (ed.) - 2017 - Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.
    Causal reasoning is one of our most central cognitive competencies, enabling us to adapt to our world. Causal knowledge allows us to predict future events, or diagnose the causes of observed facts. We plan actions and solve problems using knowledge about cause-effect relations. Without our ability to discover and empirically test causal theories, we would not have made progress in various empirical sciences. In the past decades, the important role of causal knowledge has been discovered in many areas of cognitive (...)
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  • The good, the bad, and the timely: How temporal order and moral judgment influence causal selection.Kevin Reuter, Lara Kirfel, Raphael van Riel & Luca Barlassina - 2014 - Frontiers in Psychology 5 (1336):1-10.
    Causal selection is the cognitive process through which one or more elements in a complex causal structure are singled out as actual causes of a certain effect. In this paper, we report on an experiment in which we investigated the role of moral and temporal factors in causal selection. Our results are as follows. First, when presented with a temporal chain in which two human agents perform the same action one after the other, subjects tend to judge the later agent (...)
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  • Agents and Causes: Dispositional Intuitions As a Guide to Causal Structure.Ralf Mayrhofer & Michael R. Waldmann - 2015 - Cognitive Science 39 (1):65-95.
    Currently, two frameworks of causal reasoning compete: Whereas dependency theories focus on dependencies between causes and effects, dispositional theories model causation as an interaction between agents and patients endowed with intrinsic dispositions. One important finding providing a bridge between these two frameworks is that failures of causes to generate their effects tend to be differentially attributed to agents and patients regardless of their location on either the cause or the effect side. To model different types of error attribution, we augmented (...)
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  • Causal inference when observed and unobserved causes interact.Benjamin M. Rottman & Woo-Kyoung Ahn - 2009 - In N. A. Taatgen & H. van Rijn (eds.), Proceedings of the 31st Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. pp. 1477--1482.
    When a cause interacts with unobserved factors to produce an effect, the contingency between the observed cause and effect cannot be taken at face value to infer causality. Yet, it would be computationally intractable to consider all possible unobserved, interacting factors. Nonetheless, two experiments found that when an unobserved cause is assumed to be fairly stable over time, people can learn about such interactions and adjust their inferences about the causal efficacy of the observed cause. When they observed a period (...)
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  • How children use examples to make conditional predictions.Charles W. Kalish - 2010 - Cognition 116 (1):1-14.
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  • Adaptive Non‐Interventional Heuristics for Covariation Detection in Causal Induction: Model Comparison and Rational Analysis.Masasi Hattori & Mike Oaksford - 2007 - Cognitive Science 31 (5):765-814.
    In this article, 41 models of covariation detection from 2 × 2 contingency tables were evaluated against past data in the literature and against data from new experiments. A new model was also included based on a limiting case of the normative phi‐coefficient under an extreme rarity assumption, which has been shown to be an important factor in covariation detection (McKenzie & Mikkelsen, 2007) and data selection (Hattori, 2002; Oaksford & Chater, 1994, 2003). The results were supportive of the new (...)
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  • Demoralizing causation.David Danks, David Rose & Edouard Machery - 2013 - Philosophical Studies (2):1-27.
    There have recently been a number of strong claims that normative considerations, broadly construed, influence many philosophically important folk concepts and perhaps are even a constitutive component of various cognitive processes. Many such claims have been made about the influence of such factors on our folk notion of causation. In this paper, we argue that the strong claims found in the recent literature on causal cognition are overstated, as they are based on one narrow type of data about a particular (...)
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  • : Developing reason.Deanna Kuhn, Jared B. Katz & David Dean Jr - 2004 - Thinking and Reasoning 10 (2):197 – 219.
    We argue in favour of the general proposition that the nature of reasoning is best understood within a context of its origins and development. A major dimension of what develops in the years from childhood to adulthood, we propose, is increasing meta-level monitoring and management of cognition. Two domains are examined in presenting support for these claims—multivariable causal reasoning and argumentive reasoning.
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  • Children's causal inferences from indirect evidence: Backwards blocking and Bayesian reasoning in preschoolers.Alison Gopnik - 2004 - Cognitive Science 28 (3):303-333.
    Previous research suggests that children can infer causal relations from patterns of events. However, what appear to be cases of causal inference may simply reduce to children recognizing relevant associations among events, and responding based on those associations. To examine this claim, in Experiments 1 and 2, children were introduced to a “blicket detector”, a machine that lit up and played music when certain objects were placed upon it. Children observed patterns of contingency between objects and the machine’s activation that (...)
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  • Two projects for understanding the mind: A response to Morris and Richardson. [REVIEW]Nick Chater & Martin Pickering - 1997 - Minds and Machines 7 (4):553-569.
    We respond to Morris and Richardson 's claim that Pickering and Chater's arguments about the lack of a relation between cognitive science and folk psychology are flawed. We note that possible controversies about the appropriate uses for the two terms do not affect our arguments. We then address their claim that computational explanation of knowledge-rich processes has proved possible in the domains of problem solving, scientific discovery, and reasoning. We argue that, in all cases, computational explanation is only possible for (...)
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  • Mental imagery.Nigel J. T. Thomas - 2001 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    Mental imagery (varieties of which are sometimes colloquially refered to as “visualizing,” “seeing in the mind's eye,” “hearing in the head,” “imagining the feel of,” etc.) is quasi-perceptual experience; it resembles perceptual experience, but occurs in the absence of the appropriate external stimuli. It is also generally understood to bear intentionality (i.e., mental images are always images of something or other), and thereby to function as a form of mental representation. Traditionally, visual mental imagery, the most discussed variety, was thought (...)
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  • Perceptual symbol systems.Lawrence W. Barsalou - 1999 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 22 (4):577-660.
    Prior to the twentieth century, theories of knowledge were inherently perceptual. Since then, developments in logic, statis- tics, and programming languages have inspired amodal theories that rest on principles fundamentally different from those underlying perception. In addition, perceptual approaches have become widely viewed as untenable because they are assumed to implement record- ing systems, not conceptual systems. A perceptual theory of knowledge is developed here in the context of current cognitive science and neuroscience. During perceptual experience, association areas in the (...)
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  • Attributions as behavior explanations: Toward a new theory.Bertram Malle - 2003
    Attribution theory has played a major role in social-psychological research. Unfortunately, the term attribution is ambiguous. According to one meaning, forming an attribution is making a dispositional (trait) inference from behavior; according to another meaning, forming an attribution is giving an explanation (especially of behavior). The focus of this paper is on the latter phenomenon of behavior explanations. In particular, I discuss a new theory of explanation that provides an alternative to classic attribution theory as it dominates the textbooks and (...)
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  • (1 other version)Conditional probability and the cognitive science of conditional reasoning.Mike Oaksford & Nick Chater - 2003 - Mind and Language 18 (4):359–379.
    This paper addresses the apparent mismatch between the normative and descriptive literatures in the cognitive science of conditional reasoning. Descriptive psychological theories still regard material implication as the normative theory of the conditional. However, over the last 20 years in the philosophy of language and logic the idea that material implication can account for everyday indicative conditionals has been subject to severe criticism. The majority view is now apparently in favour of a subjective conditional probability interpretation. A comparative model fitting (...)
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  • Learning causes: Psychological explanations of causal explanation. [REVIEW]Clark Glymour - 1998 - Minds and Machines 8 (1):39-60.
    I argue that psychologists interested in human causal judgment should understand and adopt a representation of causal mechanisms by directed graphs that encode conditional independence (screening off) relations. I illustrate the benefits of that representation, now widely used in computer science and increasingly in statistics, by (i) showing that a dispute in psychology between ‘mechanist’ and ‘associationist’ psychological theories of causation rests on a false and confused dichotomy; (ii) showing that a recent, much-cited experiment, purporting to show that human subjects, (...)
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  • A recurrent connectionist model of group biases.Dirk Van Rooy, Frank Van Overwalle, Tim Vanhoomissen, Christophe Labiouse & Robert French - 2003 - Psychological Review 110 (3):536-563.
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  • Causal models and the acquisition of category structure.Michael R. Waldmann, Keith J. Holyoak & Angela Fratianne - 1995 - Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 124 (2):181.
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  • Categorization as causal reasoning⋆.Bob Rehder - 2003 - Cognitive Science 27 (5):709-748.
    A theory of categorization is presented in which knowledge of causal relationships between category features is represented in terms of asymmetric and probabilistic causal mechanisms. According to causal‐model theory, objects are classified as category members to the extent they are likely to have been generated or produced by those mechanisms. The empirical results confirmed that participants rated exemplars good category members to the extent their features manifested the expectations that causal knowledge induces, such as correlations between feature pairs that are (...)
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  • Should reason be fragmented?Nenad Miščević - 1996 - International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 10 (1):23-36.
    Cognitive relativists‐pragmatists (Stich, Churchland) claim that human cognitive strategies, lacking a common goal, are in addition divergent to the point of incommensurability. They appeal to the study of reasoning heuristics for evidence on cognitive diversity and incorrigibility. It is here argued that no such evidence is offered by the research, which, on the contrary (1) presents heuristics as uniform across great variations; (2) offers advice for correcting and improving human reasoning; and (3) very often postulates a uniformity of core logical (...)
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  • Two dogmas of conceptual empiricism: implications for hybrid models of the structure of knowledge.Frank Keil - 1998 - Cognition 65 (2-3):103-135.
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  • Dynamics and the Perception of Causal Events.Phillip Wolff - 2006 - Understanding Events.
    We use our knowledge of causal relationships to imagine possible events. We also use these relationships to look deep into the past and infer events that were not witnessed or to infer what can not be directly seen in the present. Knowledge of causal relationships allows us to go beyond the here and now. This chapter introduces a new theoretical framework for how this very basic concept might be mentally represented. It proposes an epistemological theory of causation — that is, (...)
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  • The debate between current versions of covariation and mechanism approaches to causal inference.George L. Newsome - 2003 - Philosophical Psychology 16 (1):87 – 107.
    Current psychological research on causal inference is dominated by two basic approaches: the covariation approach and the mechanism approach. This article reviews these two approaches, evaluates the contributions and limitations of each approach, and suggests how these approaches might be integrated into a more comprehensive framework. Covariation theorists assume that cognizers infer causal relations from conditional probabilities computed over samples of multiple events, but they do not provide an adequate account of how cognizers constrain their search for candidate causes and (...)
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  • Explanations and Causal Judgments Are Differentially Sensitive to Covariation and Mechanism Information.Ny Vasil & Tania Lombrozo - 2022 - Frontiers in Psychology 13:911177.
    Are causal explanations (e.g., “she switched careers because of the COVID pandemic”) treated differently from the corresponding claims that one factor caused another (e.g., “the COVID pandemic caused her to switch careers”)? We examined whether explanatory and causal claims diverge in their responsiveness to two different types of information: covariation strength and mechanism information. We report five experiments with 1,730 participants total, showing that compared to judgments of causal strength, explanatory judgments tend to bemoresensitive to mechanism andlesssensitive to covariation – (...)
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  • The Preference for Joint Attributions Over Contrast-Factor Attributions in Causal Contrast Situations.Moyun Wang & Mingyi Zhu - 2019 - Frontiers in Psychology 10.
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  • Children's use of counterfactual thinking in causal reasoning.Paul L. Harris, Tim German & Patrick Mills - 1996 - Cognition 61 (3):233-259.
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  • Combining Versus Analyzing Multiple Causes: How Domain Assumptions and Task Context Affect Integration Rules.Michael R. Waldmann - 2007 - Cognitive Science 31 (2):233-256.
    In everyday life, people typically observe fragments of causal networks. From this knowledge, people infer how novel combinations of causes they may never have observed together might behave. I report on 4 experiments that address the question of how people intuitively integrate multiple causes to predict a continuously varying effect. Most theories of causal induction in psychology and statistics assume a bias toward linearity and additivity. In contrast, these experiments show that people are sensitive to cues biasing various integration rules. (...)
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  • Advancing the rationality debate.Keith E. Stanovich & Richard F. West - 2000 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 23 (5):701-717.
    In this response, we clarify several misunderstandings of the understanding/acceptance principle and defend our specific operationalization of that principle. We reiterate the importance of addressing the problem of rational task construal and we elaborate the notion of computational limitations contained in our target article. Our concept of thinking dispositions as variable intentional-level styles of epistemic and behavioral regulation is explained, as is its relation to the rationality debate. Many of the suggestions of the commentators for elaborating two-process models are easily (...)
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  • How do humans want causes to combine their effects? The role of analytically-defined causal invariance for generalizable causal knowledge.Jeffrey K. Bye, Pei-Jung Chuang & Patricia W. Cheng - 2023 - Cognition 230 (C):105303.
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  • Causes versus enabling conditions.Patricia W. Cheng & Laura R. Novick - 1991 - Cognition 40 (1-2):83-120.
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  • Singular Clues to Causality and Their Use in Human Causal Judgment.Peter A. White - 2014 - Cognitive Science 38 (1):38-75.
    It is argued that causal understanding originates in experiences of acting on objects. Such experiences have consistent features that can be used as clues to causal identification and judgment. These are singular clues, meaning that they can be detected in single instances. A catalog of 14 singular clues is proposed. The clues function as heuristics for generating causal judgments under uncertainty and are a pervasive source of bias in causal judgment. More sophisticated clues such as mechanism clues and repeated interventions (...)
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  • Theories of reasoning and the computational explanation of everyday inference.Mike Oaksford & Nick Chater - 1995 - Thinking and Reasoning 1 (2):121 – 152.
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  • Privileged Causal Cognition: A Mathematical Analysis.David Danks - 2018 - Frontiers in Psychology 9.
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  • Judgments of cause and blame: The effects of intentionality and foreseeability.David A. Lagnado & Shelley Channon - 2008 - Cognition 108 (3):754-770.
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  • Direct causation in the linguistic coding and individuation of causal events.Phillip Wolff - 2003 - Cognition 88 (1):1-48.
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  • Children's causal inferences from indirect evidence: Backwards blocking and Bayesian reasoning in preschoolers.D. Sobel - 2004 - Cognitive Science 28 (3):303-333.
    Previous research suggests that children can infer causal relations from patterns of events. However, what appear to be cases of causal inference may simply reduce to children recognizing relevant associations among events, and responding based on those associations. To examine this claim, in Experiments 1 and 2, children were introduced to a “blicket detector,” a machine that lit up and played music when certain objects were placed upon it. Children observed patterns of contingency between objects and the machine's activation that (...)
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  • How contrast situations affect the assignment of causality in symmetric physical settings.Sieghard Beller & Andrea Bender - 2014 - Frontiers in Psychology 5.
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  • Contingency, causation, and adaptive inference.David E. Over & David W. Green - 2001 - Psychological Review 108 (3):682-684.
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  • Illusions of causality: how they bias our everyday thinking and how they could be reduced.Helena Matute, Fernando Blanco, Ion Yarritu, Marcos Díaz-Lago, Miguel A. Vadillo & Itxaso Barberia - 2015 - Frontiers in Psychology 6.
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  • (1 other version)Conditional Probability and the Cognitive Science of Conditional Reasoning.Nick Chater Mike Oaksford - 2003 - Mind and Language 18 (4):359-379.
    This paper addresses the apparent mismatch between the normative and descriptive literatures in the cognitive science of conditional reasoning. Descriptive psychological theories still regard material implication as the normative theory of the conditional. However, over the last 20 years in the philosophy of language and logic the idea that material implication can account for everyday indicative conditionals has been subject to severe criticism. The majority view is now apparently in favour of a subjective conditional probability interpretation. A comparative model fitting (...)
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  • BUCKLE: A model of unobserved cause learning.Christian C. Luhmann & Woo-Kyoung Ahn - 2007 - Psychological Review 114 (3):657-677.
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  • The role of covariation versus mechanism information in causal attribution.Woo-Kyoung Ahn, Charles W. Kalish, Douglas L. Medin & Susan A. Gelman - 1995 - Cognition 54 (3):299-352.
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  • Contrasting associative and statistical theories of contingency judgments.Rick R. Mehta - unknown
    "Blocking" refers to judgments of a moderate contingency being lowered when contrasted with a strong contingency. The Rescorla-Wagner model and causal model theory account for blocking through different mechanisms. To examine the predictions from these two models, seven experiments tested the extent to which "causal scenario" and "causal order" would influence whether blocking was observed in human contingency learning tasks. "Causal scenario" was manipulated by contrasting responses to two causes of one effect or to one cause of two effects; "causal (...)
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  • Mental models and causal explanation: Judgements of probable cause and explanatory relevance.Denis J. Hilton - 1996 - Thinking and Reasoning 2 (4):273 – 308.
    Good explanations are not only true or probably true, but are also relevant to a causal question. Current models of causal explanation either only address the question of the truth of an explanation, or do not distinguish the probability of an explanation from its relevance. The tasks of scenario construction and conversational explanation are distinguished, which in turn shows how scenarios can interact with conversational principles to determine the truth and relevance of explanations. The proposed model distinguishes causal discounting from (...)
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