Actual causation: a stone soup essay

We argue that current discussions of criteria for actual causation are ill-posed in several respects. (1) The methodology of current discussions is by induction from intuitions about an infinitesimal fraction of the possible examples and counterexamples; (2) novel problem cases occur when more variables are considered; (3) as deployed in discussions of actual causation, “neuron diagrams” and causal Bayes net diagrams are ambiguous; (4) actual causation typically involves changes in a system state that produce changes, and thus, unlike most current proposals, is commonly relative to an initial system state; (5) a welldeveloped principled theory accounting for actual causes that are changes that produce changes has been available for many years using causal Bayes nets; (6) there is no reason to think that philosophical judgements about cases are normative, and (7) there is a dearth of relevant psychological research that bears on whether various philosophical accounts are descriptiv...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: SYNTHESE
• Authors: Clark Glymour, David Danks, Bruce Glymour, Frederick Eberhardt, Joseph Ramsey, Richard Scheines, Peter Spirtes, Choh Man Teng, Jiji Zhang
• Keywords: Actual Causation, Causal Bayes, Current Discussions, SYNTHESE 2010