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...

Recent Australian decisions have opened the door to possibility of liability premised on a ‘market-based’ theory causation. This article is concerned explore this emerging category claims, particularly when founded upon an allegation misleading or deceptive conduct. Specifically, examine nature market-based causation and consider role that ‘reliance’ has in case based article’s core contention ...

Most of us have a very firm belief in mental causation; that is, we firmly believe that our own distinctly mental properties are causally efficacious in the production of our behavior. This belief is dominating in contemporary philosophy of mind as a part of the causal explanatory exclusion problem for non-reductive materialists. I do not discuss the exclusion problem; rather, I assess the conc...

Both bottom-up and top-down causation occur in the hierarchy of structure and causation. A key feature is multiple realizability of higher level functions, and consequent existence of equivalence classes of lower level variables that correspond to the same higher level state. Five essentially different classes of top-down influence can be identified, and their existence demonstrated by many rea...

A reliable understanding of the nature or causation is the core feature of science. In this paper the concept of top-down causation in the hierarchy of structure and causation is examined in depth. Five different classes of top-down causation are identified and illustrated with real-world examples. They are, 1. mechanical top-down causation; 2. top-down causation via non-adaptive information co...

The dynamics model, which is based on L. Talmy's (1988) theory of force dynamics, characterizes causation as a pattern of forces and a position vector. In contrast to counterfactual and probabilistic models, the dynamics model naturally distinguishes between different cause-related concepts and explains the induction of causal relationships from single observations. Support for the model is pro...

The notion of an emergent property has aroused much recent discussion among both scientists and philosophers. Many quite different kinds of properties have been described as ‘emergent’, the only clear common factor being the broad idea that when a physical system of sufficient complexity is in a suitable configuration new properties ‘emerge’ in a way that could not have been predicted from the ...

This paper is the most complete presentation of my views on deterministic causation. It develops the deterministic theory in perfect parallel to my theory of probabilistic causation and thus unites the two aspects. It also argues that the theory presented is superior to all regularity and all counterfactual theories of causation.

Practically, causation matters. Juries must decide, for example, whether a pregnant mother’s refusal to give birth by caesarean section was the cause of one of her twins death. Policy makers must decide whether violence on TV causes violence in life. Neither question can be coherently debated without some theory of causation. Fortunately (or not, depending on where one sits), a virtual plethora...