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 ...

This overview article examines the applications of the psychological autopsy method in determining proximate causation in suicide cases. The article reviews the history of the psychological autopsy and describes its procedure and how it has proved helpful in explicating proximate causation. The five standards currently used by the courts to determine proximate causation in suicide cases are des...

Lewis ([1973a]) famously defined event c to be causally relevant to event e in world w just in case O c ð Þ and O e ð Þ as well as :O c ð Þ !:O e ð Þ are true in w, where O c ð Þ and O e ð Þ say that c occurs and that e occurs, respectively. For him, this implied that O c ð Þ ! O e ð Þ is true, because he was assuming the underlying logic to be VC, which validates ^ ð Þ ! ð Þ. If one works with...

This is an outstanding anthology. It contains extended reflections on Russell’s idea that our notion of causation is a relic of stone-age metaphysics, which fails to fit contemporary physics and thus deserves elimination (‘On the Notion of Cause’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 13, 1913, pp. 1–26). It will be of interest to anyone interested in causation or the physical image of the w...

Law360, New York (April 30, 2008) -There is fairly widespread agreement that proof of causation in a toxic tort case requires three steps: first, the plaintiff must prove that the alleged toxin can cause an injury of the sort he alleges (general causation); second, the plaintiff must prove that he was exposed to the toxin in amounts sufficient to have caused his injury; and third, the plaintiff...

The article explains why the concept of the user in Library and Information Science (LIS) user studies and information seeking behavior is theoretically inadequate and it proposes a reconceptualization of subjects, objects, and their relations according to a model of ‘double mediation.’ Formal causation (affordances) is suggested as a substitute for mechanistic causation. The notion of ‘affecti...

I argue that, on a dispositionalist account of causation and indeed on any other view of causation according to which causation is a real relation, general relativity does not give causal principles a role in explaining phenomena. In doing so, I bring out a surprisingly substantial constraint on adequate views about the explanations and ontology of general relativity, namely the requirement tha...

Interactive Causation Agent (ICA), a novel unsupervised adaptive neurosymbolic model based on a theory of causality (Interactive Causation), is defined, offering an interactive computational approach to problems in the algorithmic computing of interaction. Interactive Causation provides a compatible framework of nonalgorithmic computation and environment, permitting tractable computation of tem...

Causation can be understood as a computational process once we understand causation in informational terms. I argue that if we see processes as information channels, then causal processes are most readily interpreted as the transfer of information from one state to another. This directly implies that the later state is a computation from the earlier state, given causal laws, which can also be i...