-
174A peculiarity in pearl’s logic of interventionist counterfactualsJournal of Philosophical Logic 42 (5): 783-794. 2013.We examine a formal semantics for counterfactual conditionals due to Judea Pearl, which formalizes the interventionist interpretation of counterfactuals central to the interventionist accounts of causation and explanation. We show that a characteristic principle validated by Pearl’s semantics, known as the principle of reversibility, states a kind of irreversibility: counterfactual dependence (in David Lewis’s sense) between two distinct events is irreversible. Moreover, we show that Pearl’s sem…Read more
-
34A Characterization of Lewisian Causal ModelsIn Natasha Alechina, Andreas Herzig & Fei Liang (eds.), Logic, Rationality, and Interaction: 9th International Workshop, LORI 2023, Jinan, China, October 26–29, 2023, Proceedings, Springer Nature Switzerland. pp. 94-108. 2023.An important component in the interventionist account of causal explanation is an interpretation of counterfactual conditionals as statements about consequences of hypothetical interventions. The interpretation receives a formal treatment in the framework of functional causal models. In Judea Pearl’s influential formulation, functional causal models are assumed to satisfy a “unique-solution” property; this class of Pearlian causal models includes the ones called recursive. Joseph Halpern showed …Read more
-
201A Lewisian Logic of Causal CounterfactualsMinds and Machines 23 (1): 77-93. 2013.In the artificial intelligence literature a promising approach to counterfactual reasoning is to interpret counterfactual conditionals based on causal models. Different logics of such causal counterfactuals have been developed with respect to different classes of causal models. In this paper I characterize the class of causal models that are Lewisian in the sense that they validate the principles in Lewis’s well-known logic of counterfactuals. I then develop a system sound and complete with resp…Read more
-
243A comparison of three Occam’s razors for Markovian causal modelsBritish Journal for the Philosophy of Science 64 (2): 423-448. 2013.The framework of causal Bayes nets, currently influential in several scientific disciplines, provides a rich formalism to study the connection between causality and probability from an epistemological perspective. This article compares three assumptions in the literature that seem to constrain the connection between causality and probability in the style of Occam's razor. The trio includes two minimality assumptions—one formulated by Spirtes, Glymour, and Scheines (SGS) and the other due to Pear…Read more
-
80Adjacency-Faithfulness and Conservative Causal InferenceIn R. Dechter & T. Richardson (eds.), Proceedings of the Twenty-Second Conference Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (2006), Auai Press. pp. 401-408. 2006.Most causal discovery algorithms in the literature exploit an assumption usually referred to as the Causal Faithfulness or Stability Condition. In this paper, we highlight two components of the condition used in constraint-based algorithms, which we call “Adjacency-Faithfulness” and “Orientation- Faithfulness.” We point out that assuming Adjacency-Faithfulness is true, it is possible to test the validity of Orientation- Faithfulness. Motivated by this observation, we explore the consequence of m…Read more
-
70Spirtes, Glymour and Scheines [Causation, Prediction, and Search Springer] described a pointwise consistent estimator of the Markov equivalence class of any causal structure that can be represented by a directed acyclic graph for any parametric family with a uniformly consistent test of conditional independence, under the Causal Markov and Causal Faithfulness assumptions. Robins et al. [Biometrika 90 491–515], however, proved that there are no uniformly consistent estimators of Markov equivalenc…Read more
-
125Actual causation: a stone soup essaySynthese 175 (2): 169-192. 2010.We argue that current discussions of criteria for actual causation are ill-posed in several respects. (1) The methodology of current discussions is by induction from intuitions about an infinitesimal fraction of the possible examples and counterexamples; (2) cases with larger numbers of causes generate novel puzzles; (3) "neuron" and causal Bayes net diagrams are, as deployed in discussions of actual causation, almost always ambiguous; (4) actual causation is (intuitively) relative to an initial…Read more
-
215Is There a Problem with the Causal Criterion of Event Identity?American Philosophical Quarterly 51 (2): 109-119. 2014.In this paper, we take another look at the reasons for which the causal criterion of event identity has been abandoned. We argue that the reasons are not strong. First of all, there is a criterion in the neighborhood of the causal criterion—the counterfactual criterion—that is not vulnerable to any of the putative counterexamples brought up in the literature. Secondly, neither the causal criterion nor the counterfactual criterion suffers from any form of vicious circularity. Nonetheless, we do n…Read more
-
45Experimental results in Ultimatum, Trust and Social Dilemma games have been interpreted as showing that individuals are, by and large, not driven by selfish motives. But we do not need experiments to know that. In our view, what the experiments show is that the typical economic auxiliary hypothesis of non-tuism should not be generalized to other contexts. Indeed, we know that when the experimental situation is framed as a market interaction, participants will be more inclined to keep more money,…Read more
-
25It is well known that there may be many causal explanations that are consistent with a given set of data. Recent work has been done to represent the common aspects of these explanations into one representation. In this paper, we address what is less well known: how do the relationships common to every causal explanation among the observed variables of some DAG process change in the presence of latent variables? Ancestral graphs provide a class of graphs that can encode conditional independence r…Read more
Areas of Specialization
Science, Logic, and Mathematics |
Areas of Interest
Science, Logic, and Mathematics |
Metaphysics and Epistemology |