Doings and Subject Causation

Doings and Subject Causation

In this paper I will be primarily concerned with doings or activities rather than with the more specific case of actions. Many things we do in our daily lives are not actions. A person caught in her thoughts might smile, scratch her head, stand up and walk around. Under normal circumstances these activities are not actions, they are only doings. Doings are often done without reason. The author ...

Causation and Mental Causation

How the mind of a human being can determine the bodily spirits [i.e., the fluids in the nerves, muscles, etc.] in producing voluntary actions, being only a thinking substance. For it appears that all determination of movement is produced by the pushing of the thing being moved, by the manner in which it is pushed by that which moves it, or else by the qualification and figure of the surface of ...

Mastering the jazz standard: sayings and doings of artistic valuation

A causation coefficient and taxonomy of correlation/causation relationships

This paper introduces a causation coefficient which is defined in terms of probabilistic causal models. This coefficient is suggested as the natural causal analogue of the Pearson correlation coefficient and permits comparing causation and correlation to each other in a simple, yet rigorous manner. Together, these coefficients provide a natural way to classify the possible correlation/causation...

Causation and disease: effect of technology on postulates of causation.

This paper reviews the technical developments in microbiology that led to the discovery of new infectious agents and the effect of these discoveries on establishing proof of causation. In bacteriology, these advances included the light microscope, bacterial stains, bacterial cultures, and the methods used to isolate clones. In virology, they involved the use of filters to separate viruses from ...