A principled approach to defining actual causation
نویسندگان
چکیده
منابع مشابه
A principled approach to defining actual causation
In this paper we present a new proposal for defining actual causation, i.e., the problem of deciding if one event caused another. We do so within the popular counterfactual tradition initiated by Lewis, which is characterised by attributing a fundamental role to counterfactual dependence. Unlike the currently prominent definitions, our approach proceeds from the ground up: we start from basic p...
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I propose the purpose our concept of actual causation serves is minimizing various cost in intervention practice. Actual causation has three features: non-redundant sufficiency, continuity and abnormality; these features correspond to the minimization of exploitative cost, exploratory cost and risk cost in intervention practice. Incorporating these three features, a definition of actual causati...
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An actual cause of some token effect is itself a (distinct) token event (or fact, or state of affairs, ...) that helped to bring about that effect. The notion of an actual cause is different from that of a potential cause – for example a pre-empted backup – which had the capacity to bring about the effect, but which wasn't in fact operative on the occasion in question. Sometimes actual causes a...
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ژورنال
عنوان ژورنال: Synthese
سال: 2016
ISSN: 0039-7857,1573-0964
DOI: 10.1007/s11229-016-1247-1