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Switch to: References
Citations of:
Causality: Models, Reasoning and Inference
Tijdschrift Voor Filosofie 64 (1):201-202 (2000)
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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 (...) |
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We clarify the status of the so-called causal minimality condition in the theory of causal Bayesian networks, which has received much attention in the recent literature on the epistemology of causation. In doing so, we argue that the condition is well motivated in the interventionist (or manipulability) account of causation, assuming the causal Markov condition which is essential to the semantics of causal Bayesian networks. Our argument has two parts. First, we show that the causal minimality condition, rather than an (...) |
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Over the last two decades, a fundamental outline of a theory of causal inference has emerged. However, this theory does not consider the following problem. Sometimes two or more measured variables are deterministic functions of one another, not deliberately, but because of redundant measurements. In these cases, manipulation of an observed defined variable may actually be an ambiguous description of a manipulation of some underlying variables, although the manipulator does not know that this is the case. In this article we (...) |
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Equilibrium explanations use an equilibrium to represent and explain a system’s dynamic behavior. They provide a system with the property of global stability: a system will converge towards and remain in equilibrium regardless of its initial conditions and dynamic process. Thus, equilibrium explanations are generally treated as non-causal explanations. There are two claims subsumed under that comprehensive thesis. The first claim is that equilibrium explanations do not identify any causes because a system with global stability resists manipulation. The second claim (...) |
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It has often been noted that there is some tension between engaging in decision-making and believing that one’s choices might be predetermined. The possibility that our choices are predetermined forces us to consider, in our decisions, act-state pairs which are inconsistent, and hence to which we cannot assign sensible utilities. But the reasoning which justifies two-boxing in Newcomb’s problem also justifies associating a non-zero causal probability with these inconsistent act-state pairs. Put together these undefined utilities and non-zero probabilities entail that (...) |
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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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Topics in Cognitive Science, Volume 14, Issue 1, Page 31-44, January 2022. |
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A normative framework for modeling causal and counterfactual reasoning has been proposed by Spirtes, Glymour, and Scheines. The framework takes as fundamental that reasoning from observation and intervention differ. Intervention includes actual manipulation as well as counterfactual manipulation of a model via thought. To represent intervention, Pearl employed the do operator that simplifies the structure of a causal model by disconnecting an intervened-on variable from its normal causes. Construing the do operator as a psychological function affords predictions about how people (...) |
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Judea Pearl won the 2010 Rumelhart Prize in computational cognitive science due to his seminal contributions to the development of Bayes nets and causal Bayes nets, frameworks that are central to multiple domains of the computational study of mind. At the heart of the causal Bayes nets formalism is the notion of a counterfactual, a representation of something false or nonexistent. Pearl refers to Bayes nets as oracles for intervention, and interventions can tell us what the effect of action will (...) |
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In this paper, a novel experimental task is developed for testing the highly influential, but experimentally underexplored, possible worlds account of conditionals (Stalnaker, 1968; Lewis, 1973). In Experiment 1, this new task is used to test both indicative and subjunctive conditionals. For indicative conditionals, five competing truth tables are compared, including the previously untested, multi-dimensional possible worlds semantics of Bradley (2012). In Experiment 2, these results are replicated and it is shown that they cannot be accounted for by an alternative (...) |
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Suppose that two competing norms, N1 and N2, can be identified such that a given person’s response can be interpreted as correct according to N1 but incorrect according to N2. Which of these two norms, if any, should one use to interpret such a response? In this paper we seek to address this fundamental problem by studying individual variation in the interpretation of conditionals by establishing individual profiles of the participants based on their case judgments and reflective attitudes. To investigate (...) |
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Recent studies indicate that indicative conditionals like "If people wear masks, the spread of Covid-19 will be diminished" require a probabilistic dependency between their antecedents and consequents to be acceptable (Skovgaard-Olsen et al., 2016). But it is easy to make the slip from this claim to the thesis that indicative conditionals are acceptable only if this probabilistic dependency results from a causal relation between antecedent and consequent. According to Pearl (2009), understanding a causal relation involves multiple, hierarchically organized conceptual dimensions: (...) |
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Unmeasured confounding is one of the most important threats to the validity of observational studies. In this paper we scrutinize a recently proposed sensitivity analysis for unmeasured confounding. The analysis requires specification of two parameters, loosely defined as the maximal strength of association that an unmeasured confounder may have with the exposure and with the outcome, respectively. The E-value is defined as the strength of association that the confounder must have with the exposure and the outcome, to fully explain away (...) |
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It is widely held that it is difficult, if not impossible, to apply causal theory to the domain of quantum mechanics. However, there are several recent scientific explanations that appeal crucially to quantum processes, and which are most naturally construed as causal explanations. They come from two relatively new fields: quantum biology and quantum technology. We focus on two examples, the explanation for the optical interferometer LIGO and the explanation for the avian magneto-compass. We analyse the explanation for the avian (...) |
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Costa and Shrapnel have recently proposed an interventionist theory of quantum causation. The formalism generalizes the classical methods of Pearl and allows for the discovery of quantum causal structure via localized interventions. Classical causal structure is presented as a special case of this more general framework. I introduce the account and consider whether this formalism provides a causal explanation for the Bell correlations. |
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Questions concerning mediated causal effects are of great interest in psychology, cognitive science, medicine, social science, public health, and many other disciplines. For instance, about 60% of recent papers published in leading journals in social psychology contain at least one mediation test (Rucker, Preacher, Tormala, & Petty, 2011). Standard parametric approaches to mediation analysis employ regression models, and either the “difference method” (Judd & Kenny, 1981), more common in epidemiology, or the “product method” (Baron & Kenny, 1986), more common in (...) |
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ABSTRACT This article aims to achieve two things: to identify the conditions for transitivity in probabilistic support in various settings, and to uncover the components and structure of the mediated probabilistic relation. It is shown that when the probabilistic relation between the two propositions, x and z, is mediated by multiple layers of partitions of propositions, the impact x has on z consists of the purely indirect impact, the purely bypass impact, and the mixed impact. It is also shown that (...) |
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In criminal trials, evidence often involves a degree of uncertainty and decision-making includes moving from the initial presumption of innocence to inference about guilt based on that evidence. The jurors’ ability to combine evidence and make accurate intuitive probabilistic judgments underpins this process. Previous research has shown that errors in probabilistic reasoning can be explained by a misalignment of the evidence presented with the intuitive causal models that people construct. This has been explored in abstract and context-free situations. However, less (...) |
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In “What price coherence?”, Klein and Warfield put forward a simple argument that triggered an extensive debate on the epistemic virtues of coherence. As is well-known, this debate yielded far-reaching impossibility results to the effect that coherence is not conducive to truth, even if construed in a ceteris paribus sense. A large part of the present paper is devoted to a re-evaluation of these results. As is argued, all explications of truth-conduciveness leave out an important aspect: while it might not (...) |
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This article describes abductions as special patterns of inference to the best explanation whose structure determines a particularly promising abductive conjecture and thus serves as an abductive search strategy. A classification of different patterns of abduction is provided which intends to be as complete as possible. An important distinction is that between selective abductions, which choose an optimal candidate from given multitude of possible explanations, and creative abductions, which introduce new theoretical models or concepts. While selective abduction has dominated the (...) |
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Let us by ‘first-order beliefs’ mean beliefs about the world, such as the belief that it will rain tomorrow, and by ‘second-order beliefs’ let us mean beliefs about the reliability of first-order, belief-forming processes. In formal epistemology, coherence has been studied, with much ingenuity and precision, for sets of first-order beliefs. However, to the best of our knowledge, sets including second-order beliefs have not yet received serious attention in that literature. In informal epistemology, by contrast, sets of the latter kind (...) |
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I present a game-theoretic way to understand the situation describing Newcomb’s Problem (NP) which helps to explain the intuition of both one-boxers and two-boxers. David Lewis has shown that the NP may be modelled as a Prisoners Dilemma game (PD) in which ‘cooperating’ corresponds to ‘taking one box’. Adopting relevant results from game theory, this means that one should take just one box if the NP is repeated an indefinite number of times, but both boxes if it is a one-shot (...) |
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The paper focuses on a recent challenge brought forward against the interventionist approach to the meaning of counterfactual conditionals. According to this objection, interventionism cannot account for the interpretation of right-nested counterfactuals, the problem being its strict interventionism. We will report on the results of an empirical study supporting the objection. Furthermore, we will extend the well-known logic of intervention with a new operator expressing an alternative notion of intervention that does away with strict interventionism. This new notion of intervention (...) |
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This paper deals with the truth conditions of conditional sentences. It focuses on a particular class of problematic examples for semantic theories for these sentences. I will argue that the examples show the need to refer to dynamic, in particular causal laws in an approach to their truth conditions. More particularly, I will claim that we need a causal notion of consequence. The proposal subsequently made uses a representation of causal dependencies as proposed in Pearl (2000) to formalize a causal (...) |
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This article suggests a revision of the theory of causal nets. In section 1 we introduce an axiomatization of TCN based on a realistic understanding. It is shown that the causal Markov condition entails three independent principles. In section 2 we analyze indeterministic decay as the major counterexample to one of these principles: screening off by common causes. We call SCC-violating common causes interactive causes. In section 3 we develop a revised version of TCN, called TCN*, which accounts for interactive (...) |
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A measure of coherence is said to be reliability conducive if and only if a higher degree of coherence (asmeasured) of a set of testimonies implies a higher probability that the witnesses are reliable. Recently, it has been proved that the Shogenji measure of coherence is reliability conducive in restricted scenarios (e.g., Olsson and Schubert, Synthese, 157:297–308, 2007). In this article, I investigate whether the Shogenji measure, or any other coherence measure, is reliability conducive in general. An impossibility theorem is (...) |
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Grounding is often glossed as metaphysical causation, yet no current theory of grounding looks remotely like a plausible treatment of causation. I propose to take the analogy between grounding and causation seriously, by providing an account of grounding in the image of causation, on the template of structural equation models for causation. |
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This paper studies degrees of doxastic justification. Dependency relations among different beliefs are represented in terms of causal models. Doxastic justification, on this picture, is taken to run causally downstream along appropriate causal chains. A theory is offered which accounts for the strength of a derivative belief in terms of (i) the strength of the beliefs on which it is based, and (ii) the epistemic quality of the belief-forming mechanisms involved. It is shown that the structure of degrees of justification (...) |
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Striving for a probabilistic explication of coherence, scholars proposed a distinction between agreement and striking agreement. In this paper I argue that only the former should be considered a genuine concept of coherence. In a second step the relation between coherence and reliability is assessed. I show that it is possible to concur with common intuitions regarding the impact of coherence on reliability in various types of witness scenarios by means of an agreement measure of coherence. Highlighting the need to (...) |
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A measure of coherence is said to be reliability conducive if and only if a higher degree of coherence (as measured) results in a higher likelihood that the witnesses are reliable. Recently, it has been proved that several coherence measures proposed in the literature are reliability conducive in a restricted scenario (Olsson and Schubert 2007, Synthese 157:297–308). My aim is to investigate which coherence measures turn out to be reliability conducive in the more general scenario where it is any finite (...) |
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Occam’s razor directs us to adopt the simplest hypothesis consistent with the evidence. Learning theory provides a precise definition of the inductive simplicity of a hypothesis for a given learning problem. This definition specifies a learning method that implements an inductive version of Occam’s razor. As a case study, we apply Occam’s inductive razor to causal learning. We consider two causal learning problems: learning a causal graph structure that presents global causal connections among a set of domain variables, and learning (...) |
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Causation is widely assumed to be a binary relation: c causes e. I will argue that causation is a quaternary, contrastive relation: c rather than C* causes e rather than E*, where C* and E* are nonempty sets of contrast events. Or at least, I will argue that treating causation as contrastive helps resolve some paradoxes. |
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A measure of coherence is said to be reliability conducive if and only if a higher degree of coherence (as measured) among testimonies implies a higher probability that the witnesses are reliable. Recently, it has been proved that several coherence measures proposed in the literature are reliability conducive in scenarios of equivalent testimonies (Olsson and Schubert 2007; Schubert, to appear). My aim is to investigate which coherence measures turn out to be reliability conducive in the more general scenario where the (...) |
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A shared problem across the sciences is to make sense of correlational data coming from observations and/or from experiments. Arguably, this means establishing when correlations are causal and when they are not. This is an old problem in philosophy. This paper, narrowing down the scope to quantitative causal analysis in social science, reformulates the problem in terms of the validity of statistical models. Two strategies to make sense of correlational data are presented: first, a 'structural strategy', the goal of which (...) |
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In social science, one objection to causal analysis is that the assumption of the closure of the system makes the analysis too narrow in scope, that is, it considers only 'closed' and 'hermetic' systems thus neglecting many other external influences. On the contrary, system analysis deals with complex structures where every element is interrelated with everything else in the system. The question arises as to whether the two approaches can be compatible and whether causal analysis can be integrated into the (...) |
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The issue of causal comparability in the social sciences underlies matters of both generalization and extrapolation. After critiquing two existing interpretations of comparability, due to Hitchcock and Hausman, I propose a distinction between ontological and epistemic comparability. While the former refers to whether two cases are actually comparable, the latter respects that in cases of incomplete information, we need to rely on whatever evidence we have of comparability. I argue, using a political science case study, that in those cases of (...) |
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Philosophers of social science have emphasized mechanistic approaches to causal inquiry for some time now, showing why focusing on the mechanisms behind correlations is preferable to focusing on correlations alone (cf. Johnson 2006, Little 1991, Reiss 2007, 2009, Steel 2004, see also King, Keohane, and Verba 1994 for an example of purely correlational research). In Process Tracing: from Metaphor to Analytic Tool, political scientists Andrew Bennett and Jeffrey Checkel present a concrete method for finding evidence of causal mechanisms, process tracing. (...) |
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We study the selection of adjustment sets for estimating the interventional mean under an individualized treatment rule. We assume a non-parametric causal graphical model with, possibly, hidden variables and at least one adjustment set composed of observable variables. Moreover, we assume that observable variables have positive costs associated with them. We define the cost of an observable adjustment set as the sum of the costs of the variables that comprise it. We show that in this setting there exist adjustment sets (...) |
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A wave of recent work in metaphysics seeks to undermine the anti-reductionist, functionalist consensus of the past few decades in cognitive science and philosophy of mind. That consensus apparently legitimated a focus on what systems do, without necessarily and always requiring attention to the details of how systems are constituted. The new metaphysical challenge contends that many states and processes referred to by functionalist cognitive scientists are epiphenomenal. It further contends that the problem lies in functionalism itself, and that, to (...) |
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“Explanation” refers to a wide range of activities, with a family resemblance between them. Most satisfactory explanations in a discipline for a domain fail to satisfy some general desiderata, while fulfilling others. This can happen in various ways. Why? An idealizing response would be to say that in real science explanations fall short along some dimensions, so that for any explanatory failure there is a conceivable improvement that addresses its shortcomings. The improvement may be more accurate causally or possess more (...) |
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In this paper, we explain why the antecedent of a biscuit conditional is relevant to its consequent by extending Douvenʼs evidential support theory of conditionals making use of utilities. By this extension, we can also explain why a biscuit conditional gives rise to the inference that the consequence is (most likely) true. Finally, we account for the intuition that (indicative) biscuit sentences are false when the antecedent is false and allow for counterfactual biscuits. |
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The experimental interventions that provide evidence of causal relations are notably similar to those that provide evidence of constitutive relevance relations. In the first two sections, I show that this similarity creates a tension: there is an inconsistent triad between Woodward’s popular interventionist theory of causation, Craver’s mutual manipulability account of constitutive relevance in mechanisms, and a variety of arguments for the incoherence of inter-level causation. I argue for an interpretation of the views in which the tension is merely apparent. (...) |
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We consider the use of interventions for resolving a problem of unidentified statistical models. The leading examples are from latent variable modelling, an influential statistical tool in the social sciences. We first explain the problem of statistical identifiability and contrast it with the identifiability of causal models. We then draw a parallel between the latent variable models and Bayesian networks with hidden nodes. This allows us to clarify the use of interventions for dealing with unidentified statistical models. We end by (...) |
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Bayes nets are formal representations of causal systems that many psychologists have claimed as plausible mental representations. One purported advantage of Bayes nets is that they may provide a theory of counterfactual conditionals, such as If Calvin had been at the party, Miriam would have left early. This article compares two proposed Bayes net theories as models of people's understanding of counterfactuals. Experiments 1-3 show that neither theory makes correct predictions about backtracking counterfactuals (in which the event of the if-clause (...) |
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