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,...

Researchers have estimated differential mortality across socioeconomic groups by classifying individuals using income in the previous year. The first problem with this strategy is reverse causation. Second, annual income is a noisy measure of permanent income. This paper tackles these two drawbacks by using better measures of lifetime earnings from administrative records to classify individuals...

It is widely acknowledged that causation entails more than spatial-temporal contiguity or correlation, but efforts to specify that extra component of experience have been elusive. In this paper, we argue that the representation of causal relations is based on the feeling of force as understood through the sense of touch. Grounding causation in people’s sense of touch allows us to address long-s...

In his in uential book Making ings Happen (Oxford, ) and in other places, JimWoodward has noted some affinities between his own account of causation and that of Menzies and Price (‘Causation as a secondary quality’, BJPS, ), but argued that the latter view is implausibly ‘subjective’. In this piece I discussWoodward’s criticisms. I argue that theMenzies and Price view is not as different fromW...

We read with interest Charlie Poole’s commentary [1] on our paper, “Redundant causation from a sufficient cause perspective,”[2] in which he questions the utility of the sufficient component cause (SCC) model for examining differences between etiologic and excess effects. Poole contends that the concept we term “redundant causation” is uncomplicated and (we presume), well understood. He questio...