Event-based Theory

• Hume →
  • Mill, Mackie (conditional)
  • Reichenbach, Suppes (probabilistic)
  • Lewis (counterfactual)
  • Pearl, Woodward (interventional)

Basic claims

• Motivation: there is no power, disposition, or necessity…
  • Against Aristotle’s notion of efficient cause (object/essence based)
  • Hume’s criticism of necessity and power
  • (Logical) positivists’ criticism of unobservables
  • cf. A quote from Psilos
• Claims:
  • Causality is a lawlike relationship between events
    • [ball hitting a window] — [breaking of the window]
    • [smoking] — [developing cancer]
  • → Event & Law based
  • What are events?
    • Events, state of affairs, facts

Contentions:

• What counts as causal events?
  • Granularity (Russell, see Kutach)
  • Absence?
  • Mental events?
• What are causal relationships/laws?
  • Regularity theory: logical or probabilistic
  • Counterfactual theory: counterfactual
  • Bayes nets: functional
• Are causal relationship objective or subjective?
  • Subjective: Hume, Kant(?), Pearl(?), etc…
  • See Psillos

Mathematical Modeling by Causal Graphs

• Events: nodes (random variables)
• Causal relationships: arrows
• Questions
  • How does it relate to probability? → Causal Markov Condition, Faithfulness Condition, etc.
  • How to deal with intervention/counterfactual reasoning? → The graph surgery operation (do-calculus)

Refs

• Kutach, sec. 2