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  1. Ontic realism and scientific explanation.Michael Bradie - 1996 - Philosophy of Science 63 (3):321.
    Wesley Salmon defends an ontic realism that distinguishes explanatory from descriptive knowledge. Explanatory knowledge makes appeals to (unobservable) theoretical acausal mechanisms. Salmon presents an argument designed both to legitimize attributing truth values to theoretical claims and to justify treating theoretical claims as descriptions. The argument succeeds but only at the price of calling the distinction between explanation and description into question. Even if Salmon's attempts to distinguish causal mechanisms from other mechanisms are successful, the assumed centrality of the appeal to (...)
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  • Is hybrid formal theory of arguments, stories and criminal evidence well suited for negative causation?Charles A. Barclay - 2020 - Artificial Intelligence and Law 28 (3):361-384.
    In this paper, I have two primary goals. First, I show that the causal-based story approach in A hybrid formal theory of arguments, stories and criminal evidence is ill suited to negative causation. In the literature, the causal-based approach requires that hypothetical stories be causally linked to the explanandum. Many take these links to denote physical or psychological causation, or temporal precedence. However, understanding causality in those terms, as I will show, cannot capture cases of negative causation, which are of (...)
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  • Free Will, Causality, and Neuroscience.Bernard Feltz, Marcus Missal & Andrew Sims (eds.) - 2019 - Leiden: Brill.
    This book aims to show that recent developments in neuroscience permit a defense of free will. Through language, human beings can escape strict biological determinism.
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  • Causality without counterfactuals.Wesley C. Salmon - 1994 - Philosophy of Science 61 (2):297-312.
    This paper presents a drastically revised version of the theory of causality, based on analyses of causal processes and causal interactions, advocated in Salmon (1984). Relying heavily on modified versions of proposals by P. Dowe, this article answers penetrating objections by Dowe and P. Kitcher to the earlier theory. It shows how the new theory circumvents a host of difficulties that have been raised in the literature. The result is, I hope, a more satisfactory analysis of physical causality.
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  • Reducing causality to transmission.Max Kistler - 1998 - Erkenntnis 48 (1):1-25.
    The idea that causation can be reduced to transmission of an amount of some conserved quantity between events is spelled out and defended against important objections. Transmission is understood as a symmetrical relation of copresence in two distinct events. The actual asymmetry of causality has its origin in the asymmetrical character of certain irreversible physical processes and then spreads through the causal net. This conception is compatible with the possibility of backwards causation and with a causal theory of time. Genidentity, (...)
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  • The Ontology of Causal Process Theories.Anton Froeyman - 2012 - Philosophia 40 (3):523-538.
    There is a widespread belief that the so-called process theories of causation developed by Wesley Salmon and Phil Dowe have given us an original account of what causation really is. In this paper, I show that this is a misconception. The notion of “causal process” does not offer us a new ontological account of causation. I make this argument by explicating the implicit ontological commitments in Salmon and Dowe’s theories. From this, it is clear that Salmon’s Mark Transmission Theory collapses (...)
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  • What's right and what's wrong with transference theories.Phil Dowe - 1995 - Erkenntnis 42 (3):363 - 374.
    This paper examines the Transference Theory of causation, developed originally by Aronson (1971) and Fair (1979). Three difficulties for that theory are presented: firstly, problems associated with the direction of transference and causal asymmetry; secondly, the case of persistence as causation, for example where a body's own inertia is the cause of its motion; and thirdly the problematic notion of identity through time of physical quantities such as energy or momentum. Finally, the theory is compared with the Conserved Quantity Theory (...)
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  • Causality and conserved quantities: A reply to salmon.Phil Dowe - 1995 - Philosophy of Science 62 (2):321-333.
    In a recent paper (1994) Wesley Salmon has replied to criticisms (e.g., Dowe 1992c, Kitcher 1989) of his (1984) theory of causality, and has offered a revised theory which, he argues, is not open to those criticisms. The key change concerns the characterization of causal processes, where Salmon has traded "the capacity for mark transmission" for "the transmission of an invariant quantity." Salmon argues against the view presented in Dowe (1992c), namely that the concept of "possession of a conserved quantity" (...)
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  • Why Attention is Not Explanation: Surgical Intervention and Causal Reasoning about Neural Models.Christopher Grimsley, Elijah Mayfield & Julia Bursten - 2020 - Proceedings of the 12th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation.
    As the demand for explainable deep learning grows in the evaluation of language technologies, the value of a principled grounding for those explanations grows as well. Here we study the state-of-the-art in explanation for neural models for natural-language processing (NLP) tasks from the viewpoint of philosophy of science. We focus on recent evaluation work that finds brittleness in explanations obtained through attention mechanisms.We harness philosophical accounts of explanation to suggest broader conclusions from these studies. From this analysis, we assert the (...)
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  • Causalidade.Eduardo Castro - 2014 - Compêndio Em Linha de Problemas de Filosofia Ananlítica.
    State of art paper on the topic causation, around the problem of the nature of causation. Central theories of contemporary philosophical literature are discussed and analysed, namely, regularity theories of Hume and Mackie, counterfactual theories of Lewis, probabilistic theories of Reichenbach, Lewis and Menzies and causal processes theories of Salmon and Dowe.
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  • Mechanistic and Neo-mechanistic Accounts of Causation: How Salmon Already Got (Much of) It Right.Raffaella Campaner - 2013 - Metatheoria – Revista de Filosofía E Historia de la Ciencia 3:81--98.
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