Causal concepts and temporal ordering
Though common sense says that causes must temporally precede their effects, the hugely influential interventionist account of causation makes no reference to temporal precedence. Does common sense lead us astray? In this paper, I evaluate the power of the commonsense assumption from within the interventionist approach to causal modeling. I first argue that if causes temporally precede their effects, then one need not consider the outcomes of interventions in order to infer causal relevance, and that one can instead use temporal and probabilistic information to infer exactly when X is causally relevant to Y in each of the senses captured by Woodward’s interventionist treatment. Then, I consider the upshot of these findings for causal decision theory, and argue that the commonsense assumption is especially powerful when an agent seeks to determine whether so-called “dominance reasoning” is applicable.
Duke Scholars
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- Philosophy
- 5003 Philosophy
- 5002 History and philosophy of specific fields
- 2203 Philosophy
- 2202 History and Philosophy of Specific Fields
- 0801 Artificial Intelligence and Image Processing
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Published In
DOI
EISSN
ISSN
Publication Date
Volume
Start / End Page
Related Subject Headings
- Philosophy
- 5003 Philosophy
- 5002 History and philosophy of specific fields
- 2203 Philosophy
- 2202 History and Philosophy of Specific Fields
- 0801 Artificial Intelligence and Image Processing