In his recent article, “Liability Rules When Injurers as Well as Victims Suffer Losses,“’ Avon Leong examines the question whether the standard liability rules-pure negligence, negligence with contributory negligence, pure strict liability and strict liability with contributory negligence-can be used to induce efficient care-taking by individuals in those circumstances where both injurers’ and ...

We present a probabilistic theory of causal explanations, which integrates probabilistic and causal knowledge. Unlike most other approaches where a causal explanation is a hypothesis that one or more causative events occurred , we deene an explanation of a set of observations to be the occurrence of a chain of causation events. These causation events constitute a scenario where all the observat...

Causal illusions are situations in which a causal relationship is inferred even though a physical mechanism is not possible. We offer an explanation of such illusions in terms of a two-process account of causal understanding. According to this view, judgments of causation involve two processes: an initial fast process involving the sensation of force that gives rise to the impression of causati...

Doctors and patients are not natural enemies. On the contrary, there is commonly a special relationship between them, with vulnerability and trust on one side and caring and professional expertise on the other. A medical dispute can create turmoil of that relationship, particularly if it is conducted in the traditional adversarial procedure. Depending on how it develops, the patient may see the...

An implicit question in much of the research on the linguistic expression of causation is how the latter might be related to the underlying concept of CAUSE. A better understanding of this relationship is important if we are to explain how the syntax-semantics interface is related to non-linguistic thought. In this research we examine a set of phenomena that suggest that the relationship betwee...