Abstract

This paper concerns the empirical basis of causation, and addresses the following issues: 1. the clues that might prompt people to perceive causal relationships in uncontrolled observations. 2. the task of inferring causal models from these clues, and 3. whether the models inferred tell us anything useful about the causal mechanisms that underly the observations. We propose a minimal-model semantics of causation, and show that, contrary to common folklore, genuine causal influences can be distinguished from spurious covariations following standard norms of inductive reasoning. We also establish a sound characterization of the conditions under which such a distinction is possible. We provide an effective algorithm for inferred causation and show that, for a large class of data the algorithm can uncover the direction of causal influences as defined above. Finally, we address the issue of non-temporal causation. 1 Introduction The study of causation is central to the understanding of hum...

Citations