The Transitivity and Asymmetry of Actual Causation
Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 4 (1):1-27 (2017)
Abstract
The counterfactual tradition to defining actual causation has come a long way since Lewis started it off. However there are still important open problems that need to be solved. One of them is the (in)transitivity of causation. Endorsing transitivity was a major source of trouble for the approach taken by Lewis, which is why currently most approaches reject it. But transitivity has never lost its appeal, and there is a large literature devoted to understanding why this is so. Starting from a survey of this work, we will develop a formal analysis of transitivity and the problems it poses for causation. This analysis provides us with a sufficient condition for causation to be transitive, a sufficient condition for dependence to be necessary for causation, and several characterisations of the transitivity of dependence. Finally, we show how this analysis leads naturally to several conditions a definition of causation should satisfy, and use those to suggest a new definition of causation.
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Archival date: 2018-04-16
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Causality: Models, Reasoning, and Inference.Pearl, Judea
Making Things Happen: A Theory of Causal Explanation.Woodward, James
Causation.Lewis, David
Causation as Influence.Lewis, David
Causes and Explanations: A Structural-Model Approach. Part I: Causes.Halpern, Joseph Y. & Pearl, Judea
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2018-04-16
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2018-04-16
Total downloads
7 ( #581,075 of 31,308 )
Recent downloads (6 months)
7 ( #75,132 of 31,308 )
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