Synthese DOI 10.1007/s11229-009-9497-9 Actual causation: a stone soup essay (2008)
BibTeX
@MISC{Glymour08synthesedoi,
author = {Clark Glymour and David Danks and Bruce Glymour and Frederick Eberhardt and Joseph Ramsey and Richard Scheines and Peter Spirtes and Choh Man and Teng Jiji Zhang and B. Glymour and F. Eberhardt and J. Ramsey and R. Scheines and P. Spirtes and C. M. Teng and J. Zhang},
title = {Synthese DOI 10.1007/s11229-009-9497-9 Actual causation: a stone soup essay},
year = {2008}
}
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Abstract
Abstract 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) cases with larger numbers of causes generate novel puzzles; (3) “neuron ” and causal Bayes net diagrams are, as deployed in discussions of actual causation, almost always ambiguous; (4) actual causation is (intuitively) relative to an initial system state since state changes are relevant, but most current accounts ignore state changes through time; (5) more generally, there is no reason to think that philosophical judgements about these sorts of cases are normative; but (6) there is a dearth of relevant psychological research that bears on whether various philosophical accounts are descriptive. Our skepticism is not directed towards the possibility of a
