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Causal Propensity: A Review

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2022

I . J Good
I . J Good*
Affiliation:
Va. Polytechnic Inst. & State Univ.
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Extract

“We can judge of the perfection to which a science has come by the facility, more or less great, with which it may be approached by calculation.”

Quetelet (1828), as quoted by Landau & Lazarsfeld in the International Encyclopedia of Statistics (p. 828).

Suppose that some event F occurs and later an event E either occurs or does not. I am going to talk about the extent to which F tends to cause E, or the causal propensity of E provided by F, or the propensity or tendency of F to cause E, denoted by Q(E:F). For example, F might be the event that the captain of a firing squad shouts “Fire” and E might be that the shootee's life is_ Ended (F for Fire, E for Ended). The negation of E is denoted by E, which in this example means that the shootee does not drop dead.

Type
Part XXI. Generalizations of Bayesian Methods
Information
PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association , Volume 1984 , Issue 2: Volume Two: Symposia and Invited Papers 1984 , 1984 , pp. 828 - 850
Copyright
Copyright © 1985 by the Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

1

This work was supported in part by an N. I. H. grant number 18770. A preliminary version of the paper was presented, by a 27-minute audio-tape, at a session on Probability of Causation organized by Peter G. Groer for the Annual Meeting of the Society for Risk Analysis, 1984 September 31 to October 3, Knoxville, Tennessee.

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