Perceiving causation and causal singularism

Causation and Causal Conditionals

Causation is defined recursively: event e is the cause of condition φ in context c iff e is the only sufficient cause of φ in c, and removing e from c either removes φ from c or results in some other event causing φ. A logical language is then defined, in which it is possible to represent and reason about actual and counterfactual events in evolving partial contexts. Axiomatic theories of event...

Functionalism, Causation, and Causal Relevance

This paper argues that functional states, and states defined in terms of them, cannot be causally relevant to the output or state transitions in terms of which those functional states are defined, or to intervening mechanisms or to anything to which their output is in turn causally relevant. Functional states therefore cannot be correctly invoked in what I call "simple causal explanations". Exp...

Causal control and genetic causation

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 ...

Causation, causal perception, and conservation laws.

We investigated the perception of causation via the ability to detect conservation violations in simple events. We showed that observers were sensitive to energy conservation violations in free-fall events. Furthermore, observers were sensitive to gradually perturbed energy dynamics in such events. However, they were more sensitive to the effect of decreasing gravity than to that of increasing ...