Causal Models and Logical Interference in Epidemiological Psychiatry

Logical Implication and Causal Dependency

Suppose that whenever event x occurs, a second event y must subsequently occur. We say that x “causes” y, or y is causally dependent on x. Deterministic causality abounds in software where execution of one routine can necessarily force execution of a subsequent subroutine. Discovery of such causal dependencies can be an important step to understanding the structure of undocumented, legacy code....

Diagnosis and causal explanation in psychiatry

In clinical medicine, a diagnosis can offer an explanation of a patient's symptoms by specifying the pathology that is causing them. Diagnoses in psychiatry are also sometimes presented in clinical texts as if they pick out pathological processes that cause sets of symptoms. However, current evidence suggests the possibility that many diagnostic categories in psychiatry are highly causally hete...

Logical Consistency and Objectivity in Causal Learning

Logical consistency and objectivity are cornerstones of science that distinguish it from cult and dogma. Scientists’ concern with objectivity has led to the dominance of associative statistics, which define the basic concept of independence on observations. The same concern with avoiding subjective beliefs has led many scientific journals to favor frequentist over Bayesian statistics. Our analy...

Psychiatry and clinical pharmacy: A logical partnership

Logical Semantics for Causal Constructions

Montague’s framework for semantic interpretation has always been less well adapted to the interpretation of words than of syntactic constructions. In the late 1970s, David Dowty addressed this problem, concentrating on the interpretation of tense, aspect, inchoatives, and causatives in an extension of Montague’s Intensional Logic. In this paper I will try to revive this project, conceiving it a...