Carnegie Mellon University
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Actual Causation: a Stone Soup Essay

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posted on 2009-03-20, 00:00 authored by Clark Glymour, David Danks, Bruce Glymour, Frederick Eberhardt, Joseph Ramsey, Richard Scheines, Peter Spirtes, Choh Man Teng, Jiji Zhang
We argue that current discussions of criteria for actual causation are ill-posed in several respects. (1) The methodology of current discussions is by induction from intuitions about an infinitesimal fraction of the possible examples and counterexamples; (2) cases with larger numbers of causes generate novel puzzles; (3) “neuron” and causal Bayes net diagrams are, as deployed in discussions of actual causation, almost always ambiguous; (4) actual causation is (intuitively) relative to an initial system state since state changes are relevant, but most current accounts ignore state changes through time; (5) more generally, there is no reason to think that philosophical judgements about these sorts of cases are normative; but (6) there is a dearth of relevant psychological research that bears on whether various philosophical accounts are descriptive. Our skepticism is not directed towards the possibility of a correct account of actual causation; rather, we argue that standard methods will not lead to such an account. A different approach is required.

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2009-03-20

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