•  5
    Chance and determinism
    In Alan Hájek & Christopher Hitchcock (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Probability and Philosophy, Oxford University Press. 2016.
  •  741
    We introduce a family of rules for adjusting one's credences in response to learning the credences of others. These rules have a number of desirable features. 1. They yield the posterior credences that would result from updating by standard Bayesian conditionalization on one's peers' reported credences if one's likelihood function takes a particular simple form. 2. In the simplest form, they are symmetric among the agents in the group. 3. They map neatly onto the familiar Condorcet voting result…Read more
  •  8
    Lewis on Causation
    In Barry Loewer & Jonathan Schaffer (eds.), A companion to David Lewis, Wiley-blackwell. 2015.
    This chapter focuses on the connection between counterfactuals and causation, and on the use of causation in the analyses of other concepts, especially decision and dispositions. It briefly reviews two preliminary pieces of conceptual apparatus. The chapter divides Lewis's treatment of causation into three stages: The first is the theory presented in the 1973 paper "Causation.” The second includes the amendments included in postscripts to “Causation” in Philosophical Papers, Volume II, in 1986.T…Read more
  •  10
    Statistical Explanation
    with Wesley C. Salmon
    In W. Newton-Smith (ed.), A companion to the philosophy of science, Blackwell. 2000.
    Generally speaking, scientific explanation has been a topic of lively discussion in twentieth‐century philosophy of science; philosophers of science have endeavored to characterize rigorously a number of different types of explanation to be found in the various fields of scientific research. Given the indispensability of statistical concepts and techniques in virtually every branch of modern science, it is natural to ask whether some scientific explanations are essentially statistical or probabi…Read more
  •  65
    The lovely and the probable (review)
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 74 (2). 2007.
  •  34
    Causal Models with Constraints
    Proceedings of the 2Nd Conference on Causal Learning and Reasoning. 2023.
    Causal models have proven extremely useful in offering formal representations of causal relationships between a set of variables. Yet in many situations, there are non-causal relationships among variables. For example, we may want variables LDL, HDL, and TOT that represent the level of low-density lipoprotein cholesterol, the level of lipoprotein high-density lipoprotein cholesterol, and total cholesterol level, with the relation LDL+HDL=TOT. This cannot be done in standard causal models, becaus…Read more
  •  29
    Introduction
    In Helen Beebee, Christopher Hitchcock & Peter Menzies (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Causation, Oxford University Press Uk. 2009.
    18 page
  •  66
    Discussion: Massey and Kirk on the Indeterminacy of Translation
    Journal of Philosophical Research 17 215-223. 1992.
    Gerald Massey has constructed translation manuals for the purposes of illustrating Quine’s Indeterminacy Thesis. Robert Kirk has argued that Massey’s manuals do not live up to their billing. In this note, I will present Massey’s manuals and defend them against Kirk’s objections. The implications for Quine’s Indeterminacy Thesis will then be briefly discussed
  •  175
    In Belief and the Will, van Fraassen employed a diachronic Dutch Book argument to support a counterintuitive principle called Reflection. There and subsequently van Fraassen has put forth Reflection as a linchpin for his views in epistemology and the philosophy of science, and for the voluntarism (first-person reports of subjective probability are undertakings of commitments) that he espouses as an alternative to descriptivism (first-person reports of subjective probability are merely self-descr…Read more
  •  15
    And Causal Judgment
    In Christoph Hoerl, Teresa McCormack & Sarah R. Beck (eds.), Understanding Counterfactuals, Understanding Causation: Issues in Philosophy and Psychology, Oxford University Press. pp. 171. 2011.
  •  296
    Causal explanation and scientific realism
    Erkenntnis 37 (2). 1992.
    It is widely believed that many of the competing accounts of scientific explanation have ramifications which are relevant to the scientific realism debate. I claim that the two issues are orthogonal. For definiteness, I consider Cartwright's argument that causal explanations secure belief in theoretical entities. In Section I, van Fraassen's anti-realism is reviewed; I argue that this anti-realism is, prima facie, consistent with a causal account of explanation. Section II reviews Cartwright's a…Read more
  • Probabilistic Causation in Scientific Explanation
    Dissertation, University of Pittsburgh. 1993.
    Salmon has argued that science provides explanations by describing a causal nexus: For Salmon, this nexus is a network of processes and interactions. I argue that this picture of the causal nexus is insufficient for an account of scientific explanation: a taxonomy of causal relevance is also needed. ;Probabilistic theories of causation seem to provide such a taxonomy in their dichotomy between promoting and inhibiting causes. However, standard probabilistic theories are beset by a difficulty cal…Read more
  •  256
    I advance a new theory of causal relevance, according to which causal claims convey information about conditional probability functions. This theory is motivated by the problem of disjunctive factors, which haunts existing probabilistic theories of causation. After some introductory remarks, I present in Section 3 a sketch of Eells's (1991) probabilistic theory of causation, which provides the framework for much of the discussion. Section 4 explains how the problem of disjunctive factors arises …Read more
  •  17
    Permutation or Tranlation
    Southwest Philosophy Review 11 (2): 187-205. 1995.
  •  378
    Salmon on explanatory relevance
    Philosophy of Science 62 (2): 304-320. 1995.
    One of the motivations for Salmon's (1984) causal theory of explanation was the explanatory irrelevance exhibited by many arguments conforming to Hempel's covering-law models of explanation. However, the nexus of causal processes and interactions characterized by Salmon is not rich enough to supply the necessary conception of explanatory relevance. Salmon's (1994) revised theory, which is briefly criticized on independent grounds, fares no better. There is some possibility that the two-tiered st…Read more
  •  224
    Following Dretske (1977), there has been a considerable body of literature on the role of contrastive stress in causal claims. Following van Fraassen (1980), there has been a considerable body of literature on the role of contrastive stress in explanations and explanation-requesting why-questions. Amazingly, the two bodies of literature have remained almost entirely disjoint. With an understanding of the contrastive nature of ordinary causal claims, and of the linguistic roles of contrastive str…Read more
  •  63
    The mechanist and the snail
    Philosophical Studies 84 (1). 1996.
    Introduction: One of the most influential theories of scientific explanation to have emerged in the past two decades is Salmon's causal/mechanical theory (Salmon 1984). According to this account, scientific explanations describe a network of causal processes and interactions. In this paper, I will use an example from evolutionary biology to argue that the causal nexus, as characterized by Salmon, is not rich enough to account for many causal explanations in the sciences.
  •  78
    Farewell to Binary Causation
    Canadian Journal of Philosophy 26 (2). 1996.
    Causation is a topic of perennial philosophical concern. As well as being of intrinsic interest, almost all philosophical concepts — such as knowledge, beauty, and moral responsibility — involve a causal dimension. Nonetheless, attempts to provide a satisfactory account of the nature of causation have typically led to barrages of counterexamples. I hope to show that a number of the difficulties plaguing theories of causation have a common source.Most philosophical theories of causation describe …Read more
  •  50
    Discussion: Screening-off and visibility to selection (review)
    Biology and Philosophy 12 (4): 521-529. 1997.
    Philosophers have used the probabilistic relation of ’screening-off‘ to explicate concepts in the theories of causation and explanation. Brandon has used screening-off relations in an attempt to reconstruct an argument of Mayr and Gould that natural selection acts at the level of the organism. I argue that Brandon‘s reconstruction is unsuccessful.
  •  92
    Compact Representations of Extended Causal Models
    Cognitive Science 37 (6): 986-1010. 2013.
    Judea Pearl (2000) was the first to propose a definition of actual causation using causal models. A number of authors have suggested that an adequate account of actual causation must appeal not only to causal structure but also to considerations of normality. In Halpern and Hitchcock (2011), we offer a definition of actual causation using extended causal models, which include information about both causal structure and normality. Extended causal models are potentially very complex. In this study…Read more
  •  114
    Trumping and contrastive causation
    Synthese 181 (2). 2011.
    Jonathan Schaffer introduced a new type of causal structure called 'trumping'. According to Schaffer, trumping is a species of causal preemption. Both Schaffer and I have argued that causation has a contrastive structure. In this paper, I analyze the structure of trumping cases from the perspective of contrastive causation, and argue that the case is much more complex than it first appears. Nonetheless, there is little reason to regard trumping as a species of causal preemption.