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  1. Which Models of Scientific Explanation Are (In)Compatible with Inference to the Best Explanation?Yunus Prasetya - 2024 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 75 (1):209-232.
    In this article, I explore the compatibility of inference to the best explanation (IBE) with several influential models and accounts of scientific explanation. First, I explore the different conceptions of IBE and limit my discussion to two: the heuristic conception and the objective Bayesian conception. Next, I discuss five models of scientific explanation with regard to each model’s compatibility with IBE. I argue that Kitcher’s unificationist account supports IBE; Railton’s deductive–nomological–probabilistic model, Salmon’s statistical-relevance model, and van Fraassen’s erotetic account are (...)
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  • The Ontology of Causation: A Carnapian-Pragmatist Approach.Zili Dong - forthcoming - Journal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie:1-22.
    Metaphysicians of causation have long debated the existence of primitive causal modalities (e.g., powers), with reductionists and realists taking opposing stances. However, little attention has been given to the legitimacy of the metaphysical question itself, despite our longstanding awareness of Rudolf Carnap’s critique of metaphysics. This article develops a (broadly) Carnapian-pragmatist approach to causation as an alternative to existing metaphysical approaches. Within this pragmatist approach, metaphysical questions about causation are reinterpreted as practical questions about the choice of causal frameworks. To (...)
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  • Hesse’s Condition for Transitivity of Probabilistic Support: A Friendly Reminder.Jakob Koscholke - forthcoming - Erkenntnis:1-11.
    The probabilistic support relation is known to violate transitivity. But over the years, philosophers have identified various conditions under which it does not, most notably screening-off and weak screening-off. In this short discussion note, I wish to highlight another condition that, unfortunately, is often neglected in the literature. This condition is due to Mary Hesse who recognized its transitivity-ensuring property long before other conditions entered the stage. I show that her condition is logically independent of screening-off and weak screening-off, but (...)
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  • (1 other version)Statistical Laws and Personal Propensities.Brian Skyrms - 1978 - PSA Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association 1978 (2):550-562.
    By “Propensities” I mean the kind of probabilities that figure in laws of nature. Propensities might be (i) relative frequencies, finite or long run, de facto or modalized, or (ii) reflections of our epistemic probabilities or (iii) sui generus theoretical notions. I believe that the whole family of relative frequency proposals (i) are inadequate. As an alternative I wish to suggest (ii) an epistemic account of propensities and of nomic force in general, in the spirit of Hume, Mill, DeFinetti, Ayer, (...)
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  • Running Causation Aground.Holly Andersen - 2023 - The Monist 106 (3):255-269.
    The reduction of grounding to causation, or each to a more general relation of which they are species, has sometimes been justified by the impressive inferential capacity of structural equation modelling, causal Bayes nets, and interventionist causal modelling. Many criticisms of this assimilation focus on how causation is inadequate for grounding. Here, I examine the other direction: how treating grounding in the image of causation makes the resulting view worse for causation. The distinctive features of causal modelling that make this (...)
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  • Deep Learning Applied to Scientific Discovery: A Hot Interface with Philosophy of Science.Louis Vervoort, Henry Shevlin, Alexey A. Melnikov & Alexander Alodjants - 2023 - Journal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 54 (2):339-351.
    We review publications in automated scientific discovery using deep learning, with the aim of shedding light on problems with strong connections to philosophy of science, of physics in particular. We show that core issues of philosophy of science, related, notably, to the nature of scientific theories; the nature of unification; and of causation loom large in scientific deep learning. Therefore, advances in deep learning could, and ideally should, have impact on philosophy of science, and vice versa. We suggest lines of (...)
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  • The Open Past in an Indeterministic Physics.Nicolas Gisin & Flavio Del Santo - 2022 - Foundations of Physics 53 (1):1-11.
    Discussions on indeterminism in physics focus on the possibility of an open future, i.e. the possibility of having potential alternative future events, the realisation of one of which is not fully determined by the present state of affairs. Yet, can indeterminism affect also the past, making it open as well? We show that by upholding principles of finiteness of information one can entail such a possibility. We provide a toy model that shows how the past could be fundamentally indeterminate, while (...)
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  • 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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  • The Statistical Nature of Causation.David Papineau - 2022 - The Monist 105 (2):247-275.
    Causation is a macroscopic phenomenon. The temporal asymmetry displayed by causation must somehow emerge along with other asymmetric macroscopic phenomena like entropy increase and the arrow of radiation. I shall approach this issue by considering ‘causal inference’ techniques that allow causal relations to be inferred from sets of observed correlations. I shall show that these techniques are best explained by a reduction of causation to structures of equations with probabilistically independent exogenous terms. This exogenous probabilistic independence imposes a recursive order (...)
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  • Two Informational Theories of Memory: a case from Memory-Conjunction Errors.Danilo Fraga Dantas - 2020 - Disputatio 12 (59):395-431.
    The causal and simulation theories are often presented as very distinct views about declarative memory, their major difference lying on the causal condition. The causal theory states that remembering involves an accurate representation causally connected to an earlier experience. In the simulation theory, remembering involves an accurate representation generated by a reliable memory process. I investigate how to construe detailed versions of these theories that correctly classify memory errors as misremembering or confabulation. Neither causalists nor simulationists have paid attention to (...)
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  • On the Nature of Coincidental Events.Alessandra Melas & Pietro Salis - 2022 - Axiomathes 32 (1):143-68.
    It is a common opinion that chance events cannot be understood in causal terms. Conversely, according to a causal view of chance, intersections between independent causal chains originate accidental events, called “coincidences.” The present paper takes into proper consideration this causal conception of chance and tries to shed new light on it. More precisely, starting from Hart and Honoré’s view of coincidental events, this paper furnishes a more detailed account on the nature of coincidences, according to which coincidental events are (...)
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  • Occasionalism in a Contemporary Context.Douglas Kutach & Özgür Koca - manuscript
    This essay was completed in January 2016 and accepted for publication in a collection on occasionalism by Nazif Muhtaroglu. It attempts to update the doctrine of occasionalism to make it independent of theism and fit better with contemporary physics and a modern understanding of causation. We find that modern physics provides an avenue to support the essential core of occasionalism.
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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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  • Taking Control : The role of manipulation in theories of causation.Henning Strandin - 2019 - Dissertation, Stockholm University
    Causation has always been a philosophically controversial subject matter. While David Hume’s empiricist account of causation has been the dominant influence in analytic philosophy and science during modern times, a minority view has instead connected causation essentially to agency and manipulation. A related approach has for the first time gained widespread popularity in recent years, due to new powerful theories of causal inference in science that are based in a technical notion of intervention, and James Woodward’s closely connected interventionist theory (...)
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  • El estatus metateórico de ZFEL.Ariel Jonathan Roffé & Santiago Ginnobili - 2019 - Humanities Journal of Valparaiso 14:57-73.
    En un libro reciente McShea y Brandon defienden que la diversidad y la complejidad de la vida se explican, principalmente, por la acción de un principio que llaman “la ley evolutiva de fuerzas cero” o “ZFEL”. Tal principio actuaría de un modo implícito por detrás de muchas explicaciones de la biología, pero nunca habría sido explicitado. Asumiendo que esta idea es interesante, y que los autores en cuestión tienen razón, discutiremos el modo metateórico en que presentan dicho principio, como siendo (...)
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  • Perception as Controlled Hallucination.Justin Tiehen - 2023 - Analytic Philosophy 64 (4):355-372.
    “Perception is controlled hallucination,” according to proponents of predictive processing accounts of vision. I say they are right that something like this is a consequence of their view but wrong in how they have pursued the idea. The focus of my counterproposal is the causal theory of perception, which I develop in terms of a productive concept of causation. Cases of what otherwise seem like successful perception are instead mere veridical hallucination if predictive processing accounts are correct, I argue, because (...)
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  • Czy współczesne nauki przyrodnicze mogą inspirować filozoficzny i teologiczny namysł nad przyczynowością?Mariusz Tabaczek - 2018 - Scientia et Fides 6 (2):147-180.
    Can Contemporary Science Inspire Philosophical and Theological Reflection on Causality? The cooperation between natural science, philosophy, and theology in an analysis of the causal structure and co-dependency of entities in the universe seems to be both legitimate and expected. It turns out, however, that in practice it oftentimes raises some tensions, questions and difficulties, leading to the development of alternative and in a sense competitive models of causality and of God’s action in the world. What is more, the attitude of (...)
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  • L'impact de la structure chrono-géométrique de l'espace-temps sur la causalité.Trelut Eric - 2013 - Scripta Philosophiæ Naturalis.
    We discuss the usual account of causal structure that relies on the temporal precedence constraint between cause-effect pairs. In particular, we consider the subtle interplay between local and global characters of time and causality encoded in General Relativity. We find that the temporal precedence constraint must be relaxed. We argue that these results could lead to an enriched structure of the physical causality.
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  • Behavior Genetic Frameworks of Causal Reasoning for Personality Psychology.Daniel Briley, Jonathan Livengood & Jaime Derringer - 2018 - European Journal of Personality 32 (3).
    Identifying causal relations from correlational data is a fundamental challenge in personality psychology. In most cases, random assignment is not feasible, leaving observational studies as the primary methodological tool. Here, we document several techniques from behavior genetics that attempt to demonstrate causality. Although no one method is conclusive at ruling out all possible confounds, combining techniques can triangulate on causal relations. Behavior genetic tools leverage information gained by sampling pairs of individuals with assumed genetic and environmental relatedness or by measuring (...)
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  • A weak symmetry condition for probabilistic measures of confirmation.Jakob Koscholke - 2018 - Philosophical Studies 175 (8):1927-1944.
    This paper presents a symmetry condition for probabilistic measures of confirmation which is weaker than commutativity symmetry, disconfirmation commutativity symmetry but also antisymmetry. It is based on the idea that for any value a probabilistic measure of confirmation can assign there is a corresponding case where degrees of confirmation are symmetric. It is shown that a number of prominent confirmation measures such as Carnap’s difference function, Rescher’s measure of confirmation, Gaifman’s confirmation rate and Mortimer’s inverted difference function do not satisfy (...)
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  • Three Arguments for Absolute Outcome Measures.Jan Sprenger & Jacob Stegenga - 2017 - Philosophy of Science 84 (5):840-852.
    Data from medical research are typically summarized with various types of outcome measures. We present three arguments in favor of absolute over relative outcome measures. The first argument is from cognitive bias: relative measures promote the reference class fallacy and the overestimation of treatment effectiveness. The second argument is decision-theoretic: absolute measures are superior to relative measures for making a decision between interventions. The third argument is causal: interpreted as measures of causal strength, absolute measures satisfy a set of desirable (...)
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  • Coherence and Common Causes: Against Relevance-Sensitive Measures of Coherence.Jakob Koscholke & Michael Schippers - 2019 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 70 (3):771-785.
    Changing weather conditions and barometer changes usually coincide. Accordingly, the propositions that my barometer falls and that the weather conditions deteriorate are quite coherent—especially under the assumption that there is a drop in atmospheric pressure. Nevertheless, scenarios like these involving common causes turn out to be highly problematic for a prominent class of probabilistic coherence measures, namely, those explicating coherence based on the idea of relevance-sensitivity. In this article, we show that none of these measures accords with the intuition that (...)
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  • Generalised Reichenbachian common cause systems.Claudio Mazzola - 2019 - Synthese 196 (10):4185-4209.
    The principle of the common cause claims that if an improbable coincidence has occurred, there must exist a common cause. This is generally taken to mean that positive correlations between non-causally related events should disappear when conditioning on the action of some underlying common cause. The extended interpretation of the principle, by contrast, urges that common causes should be called for in order to explain positive deviations between the estimated correlation of two events and the expected value of their correlation. (...)
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  • A Proposed Probabilistic Extension of the Halpern and Pearl Definition of ‘Actual Cause’.Luke Fenton-Glynn - 2017 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 68 (4):1061-1124.
    ABSTRACT Joseph Halpern and Judea Pearl draw upon structural equation models to develop an attractive analysis of ‘actual cause’. Their analysis is designed for the case of deterministic causation. I show that their account can be naturally extended to provide an elegant treatment of probabilistic causation. 1Introduction 2Preemption 3Structural Equation Models 4The Halpern and Pearl Definition of ‘Actual Cause’ 5Preemption Again 6The Probabilistic Case 7Probabilistic Causal Models 8A Proposed Probabilistic Extension of Halpern and Pearl’s Definition 9Twardy and Korb’s Account 10Probabilistic (...)
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  • Path-Specific Effects.Naftali Weinberger - 2019 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 70 (1):53-76.
    A cause may influence its effect via multiple paths. Paradigmatically (Hesslow [1974]), taking birth control pills both decreases one’s risk of thrombosis by preventing pregnancy and increases it by producing a blood chemical. Building on Pearl ([2001]), I explicate the notion of a path-specific effect. Roughly, a path-specific effect of C on E via path P is the degree to which a change in C would change E were they to be transmitted only via P. Facts about such effects may (...)
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  • Modularity and the predictive mind.Zoe Drayson - 2017 - T. Metzinger and W. Weise, (Eds), Philosophy and Predictive Processing.
    Modular approaches to the architecture of the mind claim that some mental mechanisms, such as sensory input processes, operate in special-purpose subsystems that are functionally independent from the rest of the mind. This assumption of modularity seems to be in tension with recent claims that the mind has a predictive architecture. Predictive approaches propose that both sensory processing and higher-level processing are part of the same Bayesian information-processing hierarchy, with no clear boundary between perception and cognition. Furthermore, it is not (...)
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  • Epistemology of causal inference in pharmacology: Towards a framework for the assessment of harms.Juergen Landes, Barbara Osimani & Roland Poellinger - 2018 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 8 (1):3-49.
    Philosophical discussions on causal inference in medicine are stuck in dyadic camps, each defending one kind of evidence or method rather than another as best support for causal hypotheses. Whereas Evidence Based Medicine advocates the use of Randomised Controlled Trials and systematic reviews of RCTs as gold standard, philosophers of science emphasise the importance of mechanisms and their distinctive informational contribution to causal inference and assessment. Some have suggested the adoption of a pluralistic approach to causal inference, and an inductive (...)
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  • Causation and Responsibility.Michael S. Moore - 1999 - Social Philosophy and Policy 16 (2):1-51.
    In various areas of Anglo-American law, legal liability turns on causation. In torts and contracts, we are each liable only for those harms we havecausedby the actions that breach our legal duties. Such doctrines explicitly make causation an element of liability. In criminal law, sometimes the causal element for liability is equally explicit, as when a statute makes punishable any act that has “caused… abuse to the child….” More often, the causal element in criminal liability is more implicit, as when (...)
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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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  • Critical Notice.Bryson Brown - 2000 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 30 (3):467-494.
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  • DE NATURA RERUM - Scripta in honorem professoris Olli Koistinen sexagesimum annum complentis.Hemmo Laiho & Arto Repo (eds.) - 2016 - Turku: University of Turku.
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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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  • Patrick Suppes: A Profile.Carlos Ulises Moulines - 2016 - Journal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 47 (1):1-10.
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  • Reliability via synthetic a priori: Reichenbach’s doctoral thesis on probability.Frederick Eberhardt - 2011 - Synthese 181 (1):125-136.
    Hans Reichenbach is well known for his limiting frequency view of probability, with his most thorough account given in The Theory of Probability in 1935/1949. Perhaps less known are Reichenbach's early views on probability and its epistemology. In his doctoral thesis from 1915, Reichenbach espouses a Kantian view of probability, where the convergence limit of an empirical frequency distribution is guaranteed to exist thanks to the synthetic a priori principle of lawful distribution. Reichenbach claims to have given a purely objective (...)
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  • (1 other version)Propensities and probabilities.Nuel Belnap - 2007 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part B: Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics 38 (3):593-625.
    Popper’s introduction of ‘‘propensity’’ was intended to provide a solid conceptual foundation for objective single-case probabilities. By considering the partly opposed contributions of Humphreys and Miller and Salmon, it is argued that when properly understood, propensities can in fact be understood as objective single-case causal probabilities of transitions between concrete events. The chief claim is that propensities are well-explicated by describing how they fit into the existing formal theory of branching space-times, which is simultaneously indeterministic and causal. Several problematic examples, (...)
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  • Causation, Prediction, and Search.Peter Spirtes, Clark Glymour, Scheines N. & Richard - 1993 - Mit Press: Cambridge.
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  • Foundations of Probability.Rachael Briggs - 2015 - Journal of Philosophical Logic 44 (6):625-640.
    The foundations of probability are viewed through the lens of the subjectivist interpretation. This article surveys conditional probability, arguments for probabilism, probability dynamics, and the evidential and subjective interpretations of probability.
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  • Representation and Invariance of Scientific Structures.Patrick Suppes - 2002 - CSLI Publications (distributed by Chicago University Press).
    An early, very preliminary edition of this book was circulated in 1962 under the title Set-theoretical Structures in Science. There are many reasons for maintaining that such structures play a role in the philosophy of science. Perhaps the best is that they provide the right setting for investigating problems of representation and invariance in any systematic part of science, past or present. Examples are easy to cite. Sophisticated analysis of the nature of representation in perception is to be found already (...)
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  • The causal mechanical model of explanation.James Woodward - 1989 - Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science 13:359-83.
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  • Judgment dissociation theory: An analysis of differences in causal, counterfactual and covariational reasoning.David R. Mandel - 2003 - Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 132 (3):419.
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  • Epistemic causality and evidence-based medicine.Federica Russo & Jon Williamson - 2011 - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 33 (4).
    Causal claims in biomedical contexts are ubiquitous albeit they are not always made explicit. This paper addresses the question of what causal claims mean in the context of disease. It is argued that in medical contexts causality ought to be interpreted according to the epistemic theory. The epistemic theory offers an alternative to traditional accounts that cash out causation either in terms of “difference-making” relations or in terms of mechanisms. According to the epistemic approach, causal claims tell us about which (...)
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  • BELIEF IN CAUSATION: ONE APPLICATION OF CARNAP's INDUCTIVE LOGIC.Yusuke Kaneko - 2012 - Academic Research International 3 (1).
    This paper takes two tasks. The one is elaborating on the relationship of inductive logic with decision theory to which later Carnap planned to apply his system (§§1-7); this is a surveying side of this article. The other is revealing the property of our prediction of the future, subjectivity (§§8-11); this is its philosophical aspect. They are both discussed under the name of belief in causation. Belief in causation is a kind of “degree of belief” born about the causal effect (...)
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  • The Confirmation of Singular Causal Statements by Carnap’s Inductive Logic.Yusuke Kaneko - 2012 - Logica Year Book 2011.
    The aim of this paper is to apply inductive logic to the field that, presumably, Carnap never expected: legal causation. Legal causation is expressible in the form of singular causal statements; but it is distinguished from the customary concept of scientific causation, because it is subjective. We try to express this subjectivity within the system of inductive logic. Further, by semantic complement, we compensate a defect found in our application, to be concrete, the impossibility of two-place predicates (for causal relationship) (...)
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  • Naive causality: a mental model theory of causal meaning and reasoning.Eugenia Goldvarg & P. N. Johnson-Laird - 2001 - Cognitive Science 25 (4):565-610.
    This paper outlines a theory and computer implementation of causal meanings and reasoning. The meanings depend on possibilities, and there are four weak causal relations: A causes B, A prevents B, A allows B, and A allows not‐B, and two stronger relations of cause and prevention. Thus, A causes B corresponds to three possibilities: A and B, not‐A and B, and not‐A and not‐B, with the temporal constraint that B does not precede A; and the stronger relation conveys only the (...)
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  • Should causal models always be Markovian? The case of multi-causal forks in medicine.Donald Gillies & Aidan Sudbury - 2013 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 3 (3):275-308.
    The development of causal modelling since the 1950s has been accompanied by a number of controversies, the most striking of which concerns the Markov condition. Reichenbach's conjunctive forks did satisfy the Markov condition, while Salmon's interactive forks did not. Subsequently some experts in the field have argued that adequate causal models should always satisfy the Markov condition, while others have claimed that non-Markovian causal models are needed in some cases. This paper argues for the second position by considering the multi-causal (...)
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  • On Anti Humeanism and Medical Singular Causation.Stefan Dragulinescu - 2012 - Acta Analytica 27 (3):265-292.
    Abstract In this paper I offer an anti-Humean interpretation of the causal interactions in somatic medicine. I focus on life-threatening pathological states and show how Nancy Cartwright’s capacities can offer a plausible epistemology for medical processes and the singular causal claims advanced in medical diagnoses. I argue that the capacities manifested in the emergence of symptoms and signs could be tracked down if healthy organisms are construed as nomological machines and suggest that the causal reasoning from current medical practice bears (...)
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  • Causal foundationalism, physical causation, and difference-making.Luke Glynn - 2013 - Synthese 190 (6):1017-1037.
    An influential tradition in the philosophy of causation has it that all token causal facts are, or are reducible to, facts about difference-making. Challenges to this tradition have typically focused on pre-emption cases, in which a cause apparently fails to make a difference to its effect. However, a novel challenge to the difference-making approach has recently been issued by Alyssa Ney. Ney defends causal foundationalism, which she characterizes as the thesis that facts about difference-making depend upon facts about physical causation. (...)
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  • Probabilistic Causality and Multiple Causation.Paul Humphreys - 1980 - PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association 1980:25 - 37.
    It is argued in this paper that although much attention has been paid to causal chains and common causes within the literature on probabilistic causality, a primary virtue of that approach is its ability to deal with cases of multiple causation. In doing so some ways are indicated in which contemporary sine qua non analyses of causation are too narrow (and ways in which probabilistic causality is not) and an argument by Reichenbach designed to provide a basis for the asymmetry (...)
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  • (1 other version)The Manipulability Account of Causation applied to Physical Systems.Louis Vervoort - 2014
    In the following we will apply the manipulability theory of causation of Woodward 2003 to physical systems, and show that, in the latter context, the theory can be simplified. Elaborating on an argument by Cartwright, we will argue that the notions of ‘modularity’ and ‘intervention’ of the cited work should be adapted for typical physical systems, in order to take coupling of system equations into account. We will show that this allows to reduce all cause types discussed in Woodward 2003 (...)
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  • Backtracking Influence.Douglas Kutach - 2011 - International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 25 (1):55-71.
    Backtracking influence is influence that zigzags in time. For example, backtracking influence exists when an event E_1 makes an event E_2 more likely by way of a nomic connection that goes from E_1 back in time to an event C and then forward in time to E_2. I contend that in our local region of spacetime, at least, backtracking influence is redundant in the sense that any existing backtracking influence exerted by E_1 on E_2 is equivalent to E_1's temporally direct (...)
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