Concrete Causation
by Roland Pöllinger
March 13, 2018 9:42 pm
In his study of causation J. L. Mackie once referred back to David Hume, who listed causation among one of the principles that are TO US THE CEMENT OF THE UNIVERSE and thus OF VAST CONSEQUENCE IN THE SCIENCE OF HUMAN NATURE (David Hume, AN ABSTRACT OF A “TREATISE OF HUMAN NATURE”). Yet for example the early endeavours of the developers of the Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) framework, which aimed at embedding causal meaning into the formal treatment, seem to be neglected, and David Lewis’ counterfactual analysis of causation based on his possible worlds semantics does not come very handy for application. As Judea Pearl summarises: WE ARE WITNESSING ONE OF THE MOST BIZARRE CIRCLES IN THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE: CAUSALITY IN SEARCH OF A LANGUAGE AND, SIMULTANEOUSLY, THE LANGUAGE OF CAUSALITY IN SEARCH OF ITS MEANING (Judea Pearl, CAUSALITY, 2000). Borrowing mathematical rigour from statistics, one of the most prominent areas of causal modelling today sounds out the interaction of probabilistic and deterministic approaches and is centred around Bayesian Networks, through which causal notions can be identified concretely and utilised for various disciplines eventually.
Recent Episodes
Workshop Concrete Causation: Programme
14 years ago00:00/00:00Error loading: "https://cast.itunes.uni-muenchen.de/clips/j7UYBiGlUS/vod/high_quality.mp4"Welcome Address (Audio Excerpt)
14 years ago00:00/00:00Graphs as Models of Interventions
14 years ago00:00/00:00Modelling Experimental Interventions: Results and Challenges
14 years ago00:00/00:00Causation in Physics
14 years ago00:00/00:00The Causal Chain Problem
14 years ago00:00/00:00Causality and Observational Equivalence of Deterministic and Indeterministic Descriptions
14 years ago00:00/00:00A Ranking-theoretic Account of Causation
14 years ago00:00/00:00Computing Non-Causal Knowledge for Causal Reasoning
13 years ago00:00/00:00Disentangling Nets for Causal Inference
13 years ago00:00/00:00