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  1. Causes and Explanations: A Structural-Model Approach. Part I: Causes.Judea Pearl - 2005 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 56 (4):843-887.
    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. 1. Introduction2. Causal models: a review2.1Causal models2.2Syntax and semantics3. The definition of cause4. Examples5. A more refined definition6. DiscussionAAppendix: Some Technical IssuesA.1The active causal processA.2A closer look at AC2(b)A.3Causality with infinitely many variablesA.4Causality in nonrecursive (...)
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  • The paradox of confirmation.J. L. Mackie - 1963 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 13 (52):265-276.
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  • The paradox of confirmation.I. J. Good - 1961 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 12 (45):63-64.
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  • The paradox of confirmation.L. J. Good - 1960 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 11 (42):145-145.
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  • The NESS Account of Natural Causation: A Response to Criticisms.Richard W. Wright - 2013 - In Markus Stepanians & Benedikt Kahmen (eds.), Critical Essays on "Causation and Responsibility". De Gruyter. pp. 13-66.
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  • The explanation game: a formal framework for interpretable machine learning.David S. Watson & Luciano Floridi - 2020 - Synthese 198 (10):1–⁠32.
    We propose a formal framework for interpretable machine learning. Combining elements from statistical learning, causal interventionism, and decision theory, we design an idealised explanation game in which players collaborate to find the best explanation for a given algorithmic prediction. Through an iterative procedure of questions and answers, the players establish a three-dimensional Pareto frontier that describes the optimal trade-offs between explanatory accuracy, simplicity, and relevance. Multiple rounds are played at different levels of abstraction, allowing the players to explore overlapping causal (...)
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  • The explanation game: a formal framework for interpretable machine learning.David S. Watson & Luciano Floridi - 2021 - Synthese 198 (10):9211-9242.
    We propose a formal framework for interpretable machine learning. Combining elements from statistical learning, causal interventionism, and decision theory, we design an idealisedexplanation gamein which players collaborate to find the best explanation(s) for a given algorithmic prediction. Through an iterative procedure of questions and answers, the players establish a three-dimensional Pareto frontier that describes the optimal trade-offs between explanatory accuracy, simplicity, and relevance. Multiple rounds are played at different levels of abstraction, allowing the players to explore overlapping causal patterns of (...)
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  • The Explanation Game: A Formal Framework for Interpretable Machine Learning.David S. Watson & Luciano Floridi - 2021 - In Josh Cowls & Jessica Morley (eds.), The 2020 Yearbook of the Digital Ethics Lab. Springer Verlag. pp. 109-143.
    We propose a formal framework for interpretable machine learning. Combining elements from statistical learning, causal interventionism, and decision theory, we design an idealised explanation game in which players collaborate to find the best explanation for a given algorithmic prediction. Through an iterative procedure of questions and answers, the players establish a three-dimensional Pareto frontier that describes the optimal trade-offs between explanatory accuracy, simplicity, and relevance. Multiple rounds are played at different levels of abstraction, allowing the players to explore overlapping causal (...)
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  • Local Explanations via Necessity and Sufficiency: Unifying Theory and Practice.David S. Watson, Limor Gultchin, Ankur Taly & Luciano Floridi - 2022 - Minds and Machines 32 (1):185-218.
    Necessity and sufficiency are the building blocks of all successful explanations. Yet despite their importance, these notions have been conceptually underdeveloped and inconsistently applied in explainable artificial intelligence, a fast-growing research area that is so far lacking in firm theoretical foundations. In this article, an expanded version of a paper originally presented at the 37th Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence, we attempt to fill this gap. Building on work in logic, probability, and causality, we establish the central role of (...)
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  • Word and Object.Willard Van Orman Quine - 1960 - Cambridge, MA, USA: MIT Press.
    In the course of the discussion, Professor Quine pinpoints the difficulties involved in translation, brings to light the anomalies and conflicts implicit in our ...
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  • Causes and Explanations: A Structural-Model Approach. Part II: Explanations.Judea Pearl - 2005 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 56 (4):889-911.
    We propose new definitions of (causal) explanation, using structural equations to model counterfactuals. The definition is based on the notion of actual cause, as defined and motivated in a companion article. Essentially, an explanation is a fact that is not known for certain but, if found to be true, would constitute an actual cause of the fact to be explained, regardless of the agent's initial uncertainty. We show that the definition handles well a number of problematic examples from the literature. (...)
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  • The magical number seven, plus or minus two: Some limits on our capacity for processing information.George A. Miller - 1956 - Psychological Review 63 (2):81-97.
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  • The magical number seven, plus or minus two: Some limits on our capacity for processing information.George A. Miller - 1956 - Psychological Review 101 (2):343-352.
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  • Explanation in artificial intelligence: Insights from the social sciences.Tim Miller - 2019 - Artificial Intelligence 267 (C):1-38.
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  • The paradox of confirmation.J. L. Mackie - 1962 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 13 (52):265-277.
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  • Contrastive Explanation.Peter Lipton - 1990 - Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 27:247-266.
    According to a causal model of explanation, we explain phenomena by giving their causes or, where the phenomena are themselves causal regularities, we explain them by giving a mechanism linking cause and effect. If we explain why smoking causes cancer, we do not give the cause of this causal connection, but we do give the causal mechanism that makes it. The claim that to explain is to give a cause is not only natural and plausible, but it also avoids many (...)
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  • Causation.David Lewis - 1973 - Journal of Philosophy 70 (17):556-567.
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  • Norm theory: Comparing reality to its alternatives.Daniel Kahneman & Dale T. Miller - 1986 - Psychological Review 93 (2):136-153.
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  • Causes and Explanations: A Structural-Model Approach. Part II: Explanations.Y. Halpern Joseph & Pearl Judea - 2005 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 56 (4):889-911.
    We propose new definitions of explanation, using structural equations to model counterfactuals. The definition is based on the notion of actual cause, as defined and motivated in a companion article. Essentially, an explanation is a fact that is not known for certain but, if found to be true, would constitute an actual cause of the fact to be explained, regardless of the agent’s initial uncertainty. We show that the definition handles well a number of problematic examples from the literature.
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  • The Logic of Decision.Richard C. Jeffrey - 1965 - New York, NY, USA: University of Chicago Press.
    "[This book] proposes new foundations for the Bayesian principle of rational action, and goes on to develop a new logic of desirability and probabtility."—Frederic Schick, _Journal of Philosophy_.
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  • Causality: Models, Reasoning and Inference.Christopher Hitchcock & Judea Pearl - 2001 - Philosophical Review 110 (4):639.
    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 (...)
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  • Studies in the logic of confirmation.Carl A. Hempel - 1983 - In Peter Achinstein (ed.), The Concept of Evidence. Oxford University Press. pp. 1-26.
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  • Studies in the logic of confirmation (I.).Carl Gustav Hempel - 1945 - Mind 54 (213):1-26.
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  • Causal Relata: Tokens, Types, or Variables?Daniel Murray Hausman - 2005 - Erkenntnis 63 (1):33-54.
    The literature on causation distinguishes between causal claims relating properties or types and causal claims relating individuals or tokens. Many authors maintain that corresponding to these two kinds of causal claims are two different kinds of causal relations. Whether to regard causal relations among variables as yet another variety of causation is also controversial. This essay maintains that causal relations obtain among tokens and that type causal claims are generalizations concerning causal relations among these tokens.
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  • Causes and explanations: A structural-model approach. Part I: Causes.Joseph Y. Halpern & Judea Pearl - 2005 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 56 (4):843-887.
    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.
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  • Causes and Explanations: A Structural-Model Approach. Part II: Explanations.Joseph Y. Halpern & Judea Pearl - 2005 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 56 (4):889-911.
    We propose new definitions of (causal) explanation, using structural equations to model counterfactuals. The definition is based on the notion of actual cause, as defined and motivated in a companion article. Essentially, an explanation is a fact that is not known for certain but, if found to be true, would constitute an actual cause of the fact to be explained, regardless of the agent's initial uncertainty. We show that the definition handles well a number of problematic examples from the literature.
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  • The paradox of confirmation (II).I. J. Good - 1961 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 12 (45):63-64.
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  • The paradox of confirmation.I. J. Good - 1960 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 11 (42):145-149.
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  • The method of levels of abstraction.Luciano Floridi - 2008 - Minds and Machines 18 (3):303–329.
    The use of “levels of abstraction” in philosophical analysis (levelism) has recently come under attack. In this paper, I argue that a refined version of epistemological levelism should be retained as a fundamental method, called the method of levels of abstraction. After a brief introduction, in section “Some Definitions and Preliminary Examples” the nature and applicability of the epistemological method of levels of abstraction is clarified. In section “A Classic Application of the Method ofion”, the philosophical fruitfulness of the new (...)
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  • Decision-theoretic foundations for statistical causality.Philip Dawid - 2021 - Journal of Causal Inference 9 (1):39-77.
    We develop a mathematical and interpretative foundation for the enterprise of decision-theoretic (DT) statistical causality, which is a straightforward way of representing and addressing causal questions. DT reframes causal inference as “assisted decision-making” and aims to understand when, and how, I can make use of external data, typically observational, to help me solve a decision problem by taking advantage of assumed relationships between the data and my problem. The relationships embodied in any representation of a causal problem require deeper justification, (...)
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  • On the (Complete) Reasons Behind Decisions.Adnan Darwiche & Auguste Hirth - 2023 - Journal of Logic, Language and Information 32 (1):63-88.
    Recent work has shown that the input-output behavior of some common machine learning classifiers can be captured in symbolic form, allowing one to reason about the behavior of these classifiers using symbolic techniques. This includes explaining decisions, measuring robustness, and proving formal properties of machine learning classifiers by reasoning about the corresponding symbolic classifiers. In this work, we present a theory for unveiling the _reasons_ behind the decisions made by Boolean classifiers and study some of its theoretical and practical implications. (...)
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  • The Evidential Conditional.Vincenzo Crupi & Andrea Iacona - 2022 - Erkenntnis 87 (6):2897-2921.
    This paper outlines an account of conditionals, the evidential account, which rests on the idea that a conditional is true just in case its antecedent supports its consequent. As we will show, the evidential account exhibits some distinctive logical features that deserve careful consideration. On the one hand, it departs from the material reading of ‘if then’ exactly in the way we would like it to depart from that reading. On the other, it significantly differs from the non-material accounts which (...)
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  • Causal Sufficiency and Actual Causation.Sander Beckers - 2021 - Journal of Philosophical Logic 50 (6):1341-1374.
    Pearl opened the door to formally defining actual causation using causal models. His approach rests on two strategies: first, capturing the widespread intuition that X = x causes Y = y iff X = x is a Necessary Element of a Sufficient Set for Y = y, and second, showing that his definition gives intuitive answers on a wide set of problem cases. This inspired dozens of variations of his definition of actual causation, the most prominent of which are due (...)
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  • Explaining individual predictions when features are dependent: More accurate approximations to Shapley values.Kjersti Aas, Martin Jullum & Anders Løland - 2021 - Artificial Intelligence 298 (C):103502.
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  • Contrastivism in philosophy.Martijn Blaauw (ed.) - 2013 - New York: Routledge/Taylor & Francis Group.
    Contrastivism can be applied to a variety of problems within philosophy, and as such, it can be coherently seen as a unified movement. This volume brings together state-of-the-art research on the contrastive treatment of philosophical concepts and questions, including knowledge, belief, free will, moral luck, Bayesian confirmation theory, causation, and explanation.
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  • Causality: Models, Reasoning and Inference.Judea Pearl - 2000 - New York: Cambridge University Press.
    Causality offers the first comprehensive coverage of causal analysis in many sciences, including recent advances using graphical methods. Pearl presents a unified account of the probabilistic, manipulative, counterfactual and structural approaches to causation, and devises simple mathematical tools for analyzing the relationships between causal connections, statistical associations, actions and observations. The book will open the way for including causal analysis in the standard curriculum of statistics, artificial intelligence, business, epidemiology, social science and economics.
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  • Decision Theory.Katie Steele & H. Orri Stefánsson - 2012 - In Peter Adamson (ed.), Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
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  • Causal feature learning for utility-maximizing agents.David Kinney & David Watson - 2020 - In David Kinney & David Watson (eds.), International Conference on Probabilistic Graphical Models. pp. 257–268.
    Discovering high-level causal relations from low-level data is an important and challenging problem that comes up frequently in the natural and social sciences. In a series of papers, Chalupka etal. (2015, 2016a, 2016b, 2017) develop a procedure forcausal feature learning (CFL) in an effortto automate this task. We argue that CFL does not recommend coarsening in cases where pragmatic considerations rule in favor of it, and recommends coarsening in cases where pragmatic considerations rule against it. We propose a new technique, (...)
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  • The book of why: the new science of cause and effect.Judea Pearl - 2018 - New York: Basic Books. Edited by Dana Mackenzie.
    Everyone has heard the claim, "Correlation does not imply causation." What might sound like a reasonable dictum metastasized in the twentieth century into one of science's biggest obstacles, as a legion of researchers became unwilling to make the claim that one thing could cause another. Even two decades ago, asking a statistician a question like "Was it the aspirin that stopped my headache?" would have been like asking if he believed in voodoo, or at best a topic for conversation at (...)
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  • Theory of Games and Economic Behavior.John Von Neumann & Oskar Morgenstern - 1944 - Princeton, NJ, USA: Princeton University Press.
    This is the classic work upon which modern-day game theory is based. What began as a modest proposal that a mathematician and an economist write a short paper together blossomed, when Princeton University Press published Theory of Games and Economic Behavior. In it, John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern conceived a groundbreaking mathematical theory of economic and social organization, based on a theory of games of strategy. Not only would this revolutionize economics, but the entirely new field of scientific inquiry (...)
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  • Actual Causality.Joseph Halpern - 2016 - MIT Press.
    A new approach for defining causality and such related notions as degree of responsibility, degrees of blame, and causal explanation. Causality plays a central role in the way people structure the world; we constantly seek causal explanations for our observations. But what does it even mean that an event C "actually caused" event E? The problem of defining actual causation goes beyond mere philosophical speculation. For example, in many legal arguments, it is precisely what needs to be established in order (...)
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  • The Foundations of Statistics.Leonard J. Savage - 1954 - Wiley Publications in Statistics.
    Classic analysis of the subject and the development of personal probability; one of the greatest controversies in modern statistcal thought.
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  • A Theory of Conditionals.Robert Stalnaker - 1968 - In Nicholas Rescher (ed.), Studies in Logical Theory (American Philosophical Quarterly Monographs 2). Oxford: Blackwell. pp. 98-112.
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  • Causality: Models, Reasoning and Inference.Judea Pearl - 2000 - Tijdschrift Voor Filosofie 64 (1):201-202.
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  • The Foundations of Statistics.Leonard J. Savage - 1954 - Synthese 11 (1):86-89.
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  • Causation.D. Lewis - 1973 - In Philosophical Papers Ii. Oxford University Press. pp. 159-213.
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  • Causes and explanations: A structural-model approach.Judea Pearl - manuscript
    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 difficultiesn in the traditional account.
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  • Counterfactuals.David Lewis - 1973 - Foundations of Language 13 (1):145-151.
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  • Meaning-preserving contraposition of conditionals.Gilberto Gomes - 2019 - Journal of Pragmatics 1 (152):46-60.
    It is argued that contraposition is valid for a class of natural language conditionals, if some modifications are allowed to preserve the meaning of the original conditional. In many cases, implicit temporal indices must be considered, making a change in verb tense necessary. A suitable contrapositive for implicative counterfactual conditionals can also usually be found. In some cases, the addition of certain words is necessary to preserve meaning that is present in the original sentence and would be lost or changed (...)
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  • Causes and Conditions.J. L. Mackie - 1965 - American Philosophical Quarterly 2 (4):245 - 264.
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