A priori causal laws

A priori causal laws

Causal Laws and Singular Causation

In this paper it will be argued that causal laws describe the actions of causal powers. The process which results from such an action is one which belongs to a natural kind, the essence of which is that it is a display of this causal power. Therefore, if anything has a given causal power necessarily, it must be naturally disposed to act in the manner prescribed by the causal law describing the ...

Causal Laws and Multi - Valued

Causal Laws and Multi-Valued Fluents

This paper continues the line of work on representing properties of actions in nonmonotonic formalisms that stresses the distinction between being true and being caused, as in the system of causal logic introduced by McCain and Turner and in the action language C proposed by Giunchiglia and Lifschitz. The only fluents directly representable in language C are truth-valued fluents, which is often...

Causal Laws Are Objectifications of Inductive Schemes*

And this paper is an attempt to say precisely how, thus addressing a philosophical problem which is commonly taken to be a serious one. It does so, however, in quite an idiosyncratic way. It is based on the account of inductive schemes I have given in (1988) and (1990a) and on the conception of causation I have presented in (1980), (1983), and (1990b), and it intends to fill one of many gaps wh...