There is a need of matching text difficulty to the expected reading skill of the audience. Readability measures were developed with this objective in mind, first by psycholinguists, and more recently, by practitioners of natural language processing. A common strategy was to extract linguistic features that are good predictors of readability, and then train discriminative classification or regre...

It is generally accepted that the most serious threat to the possibility of mental causation is posed by the causal self-sufficiency of physical causal processes. I argue, however, that this feature of the world, which I articulate in principle I call Completeness, in fact poses no genuine threat to mental causation. Some find Completeness threatening to mental causation because they confuse it...

In this article I examine the relation between causation and moral responsibility. I distinguish four possible views about that relation. One is the standard view: the view that an agent’s moral responsibility for an outcome requires, and is grounded in, the agent’s causal responsibility for it. I discuss several challenges to the standard view, which motivate the three remaining views. The fin...

Sober (1984) presents an account of selection motivated by the view that one property can causally explain the occurrence of another only if the first plays a unique role in the causal production of the second. Sober holds that a causal property will play such a unique role if it is a population level cause of its effect, and on this basis argues that there is selection for a trait T only if T ...

This paper announces support in the form of the Spearman rank correlation test for the hypothesis: stock variance is a stable commodity, but the covariance of stocks varies randomly. Among the consequences of this hypothesis are: 1. Arbitrage equations involving covariances do not constrain the marketplace. 2. Variance is a stable commodity whose price is set by the arbitrage opportunities it p...

I propose a non-Humean theory of causation with “tendencies” as causal connections. Not, however, as “necessary connexions”: causes are not sufficient, they do not necessitate their effects. The theory is designed to be, not an analysis of the concept of causation, but a description of what is the case in typical cases of causation. I therefore call it a metaphysical theory of causation, as opp...

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...

Evidence based medicine has been a topic of considerable controversy in medical and health care circles over its short lifetime, because of the claims made by its exponents about the criteria used to assess the evidence for or against the effectiveness of medical interventions. The central epistemological debates underpinning the debates about evidence based medicine are reviewed by this paper,...