We examine a formal semantics for counterfactual conditionals due to Judea Pearl, which formalizes the interventionist interpretation of counterfactuals central to the interventionist accounts of causation and explanation. We show that a characteristic principle validated by Pearl’s semantics, known as the principle of reversibility, states a kind of irreversibility: counterfactual dependence (in David Lewis’s sense) between two distinct events is irreversible. Moreover, we show that Pearl’s semantics rules out only mutual counterfactual dependence, not cyclic dependence in general. This, we argue, (...) suggests that Pearl’s logic is either too weak or too strong. (shrink)

In the artificial intelligence literature a promising approach to counterfactual reasoning is to interpret counterfactual conditionals based on causal models. Different logics of such causal counterfactuals have been developed with respect to different classes of causal models. In this paper I characterize the class of causal models that are Lewisian in the sense that they validate the principles in Lewis’s well-known logic of counterfactuals. I then develop a system sound and complete with respect to this class. The resulting logic is (...) the weakest logic of causal counterfactuals that respects Lewis’s principles, sits in between the logic developed by Galles and Pearl and the logic developed by Halpern, and stands to Galles and Pearl’s logic in the same fashion as Lewis’s stands to Stalnaker’s. (shrink)

Judea Pearl has been at the forefront of research in the burgeoning field of causal modeling, and Causality is the culmination of his work over the last dozen or so years. For philosophers of science with a serious interest in causal modeling, Causality is simply mandatory reading. Chapter 2, in particular, addresses many of the issues familiar from works such as Causation, Prediction and Search by Peter Spirtes, Clark Glymour, and Richard Scheines. But philosophers with a more general interest in (...) causation will also profit from reading Pearl’s book, especially the material in chapters 7, 9, and 10, which is self-contained and less technical than other parts of the book. The present review is aimed primarily at readers of the second type. (shrink)

We propose a new definition of actual causes, using structural equations to model counterfactuals. We show that the definition yields a plausible and elegant account of causation that handles well examples which have caused problems for other definitions and resolves major difficulties in the traditional account.