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Actual Causation by Probabilistic Active Paths

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Charles R. Twardy  and
Kevin B. Korb
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Abstract

Recently Halpern and Pearl and Hitchcock have presented influential accounts of actual (token) causation using Bayesian networks. These accounts have been deterministic. Here we present a probabilistic extension to these active path analyses of actual causation. The extension uses “soft” interventions to set distributions rather than just single values. The resulting account can handle at least as wide a range of examples as the original accounts, without assuming determinism.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 78 , Issue 5 , December 2011 , pp. 900 - 913
Copyright
Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

‡

This work was funded in part by a Monash Arts/IT grant. We are grateful for comments by Toby Handfield, Graham Oppy, Lucas Hope, Chris Hitchcock, an anonymous reviewer, and participants in the Monash 2004 causation seminar as well as PSA 2010 in Montreal.

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