On Laws and Counterfactuals in Causal Reasoning

Laws and Explanations; Theories and Modal Possibilities, 2019

In the preceding chapter, we explored the possibility of how serious criticism of the Hempel model of explanation might have been met by assuming that laws were representable as counterfactuals. That assumption only made matters worse. We now wish to look at a weaker claim that has had many advocates: It is the idea that laws are distinguished from true contingent generalizations in that they support their corresponding counterfactual conditionals, while mere contingent generalizations do not. We think that even this weaker connection is untenable. There are two widely endorsed criteria that have been used to distinguish those generalizations that are laws from the rest. One is that laws support their corresponding counterfactual conditionals,the counterfactual connection, and the other is that laws possess a special kind of necessity that non-laws don't have. These two criteria are closely connected, but neither one is intended to be both a necessary and sufficient condition. In this chapter we will consider only the counterfactual connection, and we will postpone modal considerations for a later chapter. The counterfactual connection for laws is simply that laws support their corresponding counterfactual conditionals. The notion of "support" needs some explanation. It cannot mean evidential support. There can be evidence for laws, but there are almost no cases where some laws are evidence for, or confirm other laws. I suggest, following the few leads in the literature, according to which "support" of the corresponding counterfactual means "logical implication". Thus we understand the counterfactual connection to be the claim that (C) Laws imply their corresponding counterfactuals. We will refer to (C) as The Counterfactual Connection. The immediate problem is that this formulation is ambiguous. There are at least two possible readings: (1) If A is a law, then A implies its corresponding counterfactual conditional. and (2) ℒ(A) implies the counterfactual corresponding to A, where "ℒ(A)" just states that it is a law that A.

Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 1991

Humana.Mente, 2011

Synthese, 2017

In this paper I present a limitation to what may be called strictly-interventionistic causal-model semantic theories for subjunctive conditionals. And I offer a line of response to Briggs' (Philos Stud 160:139–166, 2012) counterexample to Modus Ponens—given within a strictly-interventionistic framework—for the subjunctive conditional. The paper also contains some discussion of backtracking counterfactuals and backtracking interpretations. The limitation inherent to strict inter-ventionism is brought out via a class of counterexamples. A causal-model semantics is strictly interventionistic just in case the procedure it gives for evaluating a subjunctive conditional requires making the values of the variables implicated in the antecedent independent from the values of the parents of these antecedent variables. Most causal-model semantic theories that have gained attention are strictly interventionistic.

Synthese, 2017

A counterlegal is a counterfactual conditional containing an antecedent that is inconsistent with some set of laws. A backtracker is a counterfactual that tells us how things would be at a time earlier than that of its antecedent, were the antecedent to obtain. Typically, theories that evaluate counterlegals appropriately don't evaluate backtrackers properly, and vice versa. Two cases in point: Lewis' (Noûs 13:455–476, 1979a) ordering semantics handles counterlegals well but not backtrack-ers. Hiddleston's (Noûs 39(4):632–657, 2005) causal-model semantics nicely handles backtrackers but not counterlegals. Taking Hiddleston's account as a starting point, I offer steps toward a theory capable of handling both counterlegals and backtrackers. The core contribution of this paper is a means for evaluating counterlegals relative to minimally-illegal models.

Philosophical Studies, 2010

I argue that one central aspect of the epistemology of causation, the use of causes as evidence for their effects, is largely independent of the metaphysics of causation. In particular, I use the formalism of Bayesian causal graphs to factor the incremental evidential impact of a cause for its effect into a direct cause-to-effect component and a backtracking component. While the ''backtracking'' evidence that causes provide about earlier events often obscures things, once we our restrict attention to the cause-to-effect component it is true to say promoting (inhibiting) causes raise (lower) the probabilities of their effects. This factoring assumes the same form whether causation is given an interventionist, counterfactual or probabilistic interpretation. Whether we think about causation in terms of interventions and causal graphs, counterfactuals and imaging functions, or probability raising against the background of causally homogenous partitions, if we describe the essential features of a situation correctly then the incremental evidence that a cause provides for its effect in virtue of being its cause will be the same. Keywords Causal inference Á Incremental evidence Á Bayesian causal graph Á Markov condition Á Imaging Á Backtracking counterfactual Á Probabilistic causation My topic is the epistemology of causation. Philosophical discussions of causation usually focus on metaphysics: Is causation merely constant conjunction? Is it a projection of human habits of inference? Do causal claims presuppose the truth of general laws? What is the relation between causation and our ability to manipulate events? How are causal and counterfactual claims related? While these are important questions, it is no part of my purpose here to answer them. First, I don't

2011

On one view, an adequate account of causal understanding may focus exclusively on what is involved in mastering general causal concepts (concepts such as ‘x causes y’ or ‘p causally explains q’). An alternative view is that causal understanding is, partly but irreducibly, a matter of grasping what Anscombe called special causal concepts, concepts such as ‘push’, ‘flatten’, or ‘knock over’. We can label these views generalist vs particularist approaches to causal understanding. It is worth emphasizing that the contrast here is not between two kinds of theories of the metaphysics of causation, but two views of the nature and perhaps source of ordinary causal understanding. One aim of this paper is to argue that it would be a mistake to dismiss particularism because of its putative metaphysical commitments. I begin by formulating an intuitively attractive version of particularism due to P.F. Strawson, a central element of which is what I will call naı̈ve realism concerning mechanical t...

Artificial Intelligence, 1999

A stratified view of causal reasoning is set forth; one in which the identification of counterfactual dependencies plays an important role in determining what sort of causal connection, if any, exists between two events named by a given pair of partial descriptions. A semantics for temporal counterfactuals in which events are represented at the object level is then formalized based on a syntactic form of belief updating. Counterfactuals are evaluated relative to an agent's information state, taken to include a set of initial beliefs together with additional assumptions to handle the frame problem. Inertial inferences emerge as a side-effect of requiring minimal information change between states of the world in some chronicle. A chronicle is, in addition, assumed minimal with respect to an explanatory preference that minimizes the set of beliefs that are not part of an agent's initial set of beliefs or are not supported by some body of law-like knowledge. A number of epistemic preferences that underly the choice of alternative worlds in accommodating a counterfactual supposition are then examined ranging over types of knowledge, locality of action, and time. This leads to a semantics for causation.

Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning, 2016

We will explore the use of disjunctive causal rules for representing indeterminate causation. We provide first a logical formalization of such rules in the form of a disjunctive inference relation, and describe its logical semantics. Then we consider a nonmonotonic semantics for such rules, described in (Turner 1999). It will be shown, however, that, under this semantics, disjunctive causal rules admit a stronger logic in which these rules are reducible to ordinary, singular causal rules. This semantics also tends to give an exclusive interpretation of disjunctive causal effects, and so excludes some reasonable models in particular cases. To overcome these shortcomings, we will introduce an alternative nonmonotonic semantics for disjunctive causal rules, called a covering semantics, that permits an inclusive interpretation of indeterminate causal information. Still, it will be shown that even in this case there exists a systematic procedure, that we will call a normalization, that allows us to capture precisely the covering semantics using only singular causal rules. This normalization procedure can be viewed as a kind of nonmonotonic completion, and it generalizes established ways of representing indeterminate effects in current theories of action.