Starting with causation, the intended notion is perhaps best introduced by examples. Causation is present when one billiard ball strikes another (which Hume called ‘a perfect instance’ of causation), when a person lifts a suitcase, and when a spring uncoils. To a first approximation, one might test for causation by testing for counterfactual dependence: if the cause had not occurred, then the e...

The starting point in the development of probabilistic analyses of token causation has usually been the naIve intuition that, in some relevant sense, a cause raises the probability of its effect. But there are well-known examples both of non-probability-raising causation and of probability-raising non-causation. Sophisticated extant probabilistic analyses treat many such cases correctly, but on...

The starting point in the development of probabilistic analyses of token causation has usually been the naive intuition that, in some relevant sense, a cause raises the probability of its effect. But there are well-known examples both of non-probability-raising causation and of probabilityraising non-causation. Sophisticated extant probabilistic analyses treat many such cases correctly, but onl...

1993. McDermott, Michael. "Redundant Causation." British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 40 (1995): 523-544. Mellor, D. H. The Facts of Causation. London: Routledge, 1995. Mellor, D. H. "Fixed Past, Unfixed Future." In Contributions to Philosophy: Michael Dummett, edited by Barry Taylor, 166-186. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1986. Menzies, Peter. "Probabilistic Causation and Causal Processes: A Cr...

There is a systematic and suggestive analogy between grounding and causation. In my view, this is no coincidence: grounding and causation resemble one another because grounding is a type of causation. I defend the identification of grounding with metaphysical causation from some initial objections, and I draw on the causation literature to explore connections between grounding and counterfactua...

Everybody agrees that the distinction between direct and indirect causation is important. And it seems easy to draw, i f an analysis of causation in general is available. The causal influence of one event on another is direct, if it is not mediated by other events in between; otherwise it is indirect. The trouble is with the proviso. Indeed, I contend that the order of analysis must be reversed...

Top-down causation has been implicit in many sociological accounts of social structure and its influence on social events, but the social sciences have struggled to provide a coherent account of top-down causation itself. This paper summarizes a critical realist view of causation and emergence, shows how it supports a plausible account of top-down causation and then applies this account to the ...

Causation is a concept that plays an essential role in reasoning with commonsense. It is a property inherent to the dynamics of changing environments. Therefore, it should follow that causation should also play an essential role in the theories of action and change. However, in this article we postulate that causation is a form of abstraction. As a consequence of this view, one should not attem...

Causal relations permeate human knowledge across a wide range of domains, from the physical to the abstract. The existence of causal relations in many different domains raises an interesting challenge for accounts of causation. On the one hand, the word cause, and related words, can be used to describe a very wide range of situations, consistent with the possibility that people’s representation...