Causality - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Causality (also referred to as causation. In general, a process has many causes, which are said to be causal factors for it, and all lie in its past. An effect can in turn be a cause of many other effects. Although retrocausality is sometimes referred to in thought experiments and hypothetical analyses, causality is generally accepted to be temporally bound so that causes always precede their dependent effects. Causality is an abstraction that indicates how the world progresses, so basic a concept that it is more apt as an explanation of other concepts of progression than as something to be explained by others more basic. The concept is like those of agency and efficacy. MAGOUN, H.W., FISHER, C. The neurohypophysis and water exchange in the monkey. Endocrinology, 25, 161-174. View Lab Report - social-psychology-principles.pdf from MATH 502 at UNCuyo. Social PsychologyPrinciplesv. 1.0This is the book Social Psychology Principles. In statistics, a Q–Q plot ('Q' stands for quantile) is a probability plot, which is a graphical method for comparing two probability distributions by plotting their. For this reason, a leap of intuition may be needed to grasp it. In this case, failure to recognize that different kinds of . Of Aristotle's four explanatory modes, the one nearest to the concerns of the present article is the . Then it allocates its constituent elements: a cause, an effect and link itself, that joins both of them. Concept. That is to say, it would make good sense grammatically to say either . In this view, one opinion, proposed as a metaphysical principle in process philosophy, is that every cause and every effect is respectively some process, event, becoming, or happening. Another view is that causes and effects are 'states of affairs', with the exact natures of those entities being less restrictively defined than in process philosophy. For example, in Aristotle's efficient causal explanation, an action can be a cause while an enduring object is its effect. For example, the generative actions of his parents can be regarded as the efficient cause, with Socrates being the effect, Socrates being regarded as an enduring object, in philosophical tradition called a 'substance', as distinct from an action. Epistemology. As developed by Alfred Robb, these properties allow the derivation of the notions of time and space. The presence of x, however, does not imply that y will occur. However, another cause z may alternatively cause y. Thus the presence of y does not imply the presence of x. It is implicit that all of them are contributory. For the specific effect, in general, there is no implication that a contributory cause is necessary, though it may be so. In general, a factor that is a contributory cause is not sufficient, because it is by definition accompanied by other causes, which would not count as causes if it were sufficient. For the specific effect, a factor that is on some occasions a contributory cause might on some other occasions be sufficient, but on those other occasions it would not be merely contributory. Mackie argues that usual talk of . Consider the collection of events: the short circuit, the proximity of flammable material, and the absence of firefighters. Together these are unnecessary but sufficient to the house's burning down (since many other collections of events certainly could have led to the house burning down, for example shooting the house with a flamethrower in the presence of oxygen and so forth). Within this collection, the short circuit is an insufficient (since the short circuit by itself would not have caused the fire) but non- redundant (because the fire would not have happened without it, everything else being equal) part of a condition which is itself unnecessary but sufficient for the occurrence of the effect. So, the short circuit is an INUS condition for the occurrence of the house burning down. Contrasted with conditionals. An important distinction is that statements of causality require the antecedent to precede or coincide with the consequent in time, whereas conditional statements do not require this temporal order. Confusion commonly arises since many different statements in English may be presented using . The two types of statements are distinct, however. For example, all of the following statements are true when interpreting . The second is true in sentential logic and indeterminate in natural language, regardless of the consequent statement that follows, because the antecedent is false. The ordinary indicative conditional has somewhat more structure than the material conditional. For instance, although the first is the closest, neither of the preceding two statements seems true as an ordinary indicative reading.
But the sentence. If Shakespeare of Stratford- on- Avon did not write Macbeth, then someone else did. Shakespeare's not writing Macbeth and someone else's actually writing it. Another sort of conditional, the counterfactual conditional, has a stronger connection with causality, yet even counterfactual statements are not all examples of causality. Consider the following two statements: If A were a triangle, then A would have three sides. If switch S were thrown, then bulb B would light. In the first case, it would not be correct to say that A's being a triangle caused it to have three sides, since the relationship between triangularity and three- sidedness is that of definition. The property of having three sides actually determines A's state as a triangle. Nonetheless, even when interpreted counterfactually, the first statement is true. An early version of Aristotle's . In this version of the theory, that the closed polygon has three sides is said to be the . Nevertheless, it is within the scope of ordinary language to say that it is essential to a triangle that it has three sides. A full grasp of the concept of conditionals is important to understanding the literature on causality. In everyday language, loose conditional statements are often enough made, and need to be interpreted carefully. Questionable cause. They are of the form, if A were the case, then B would be the case, or if A had been the case, then B would have been the case. Counterfactual conditionals are specifically subjunctive conditionals whose antecedents are in fact false, hence the name. However the term used technically may apply to conditionals with true antecedents as well. Psychological research shows that people's thoughts about the causal relationships between events influences their judgments of the plausibility of counterfactual alternatives, and conversely, their counterfactual thinking about how a situation could have turned out differently changes their judgments of the causal role of events and agents. Nonetheless, their identification of the cause of an event, and their counterfactual thought about how the event could have turned out differently do not always coincide. Hume remarks that we may define the relation of cause and effect such that ``where, if the first object had not been, the second never had existed. That is, C causes E if and only if there exists a sequence of events C, D1, D2, .. Dk, E such that each event in the sequence depends on the previous. Note that the analysis does not purport to explain how we make causal judgements or how we reason about causation, but rather to give a metaphysical account of what it is for there to be a causal relation between some pair of events. If correct, the analysis has the power to explain certain features of causation. Knowing that causation is a matter of counterfactual dependence, we may reflect on the nature of counterfactual dependence to account for the nature of causation. For example, in his paper . In this sense, war does not cause deaths, nor does smoking cause cancer or emphysema. As a result, many turn to a notion of probabilistic causation. This intuitive condition is not adequate as a definition for probabilistic causation because of its being too general and thus not meeting our intuitive notion of cause and effect. For example, if A denotes the event . The last relationship states that knowing that the person has emphysema increases the likelihood that he will have cancer. The reason for this is having the information that the person has emphysema increases the likelihood that the person is a smoker thus indirectly increases the likelihood that the person will have cancer. However, we would not want to conclude that having emphysema causes cancer. Thus, we need additional conditions such as temporal relationship of A to be and a rational explanation as to the mechanism of action. It is hard to quantify this last requirement and thus different authors prefer somewhat different definitions. The theory underlying these derivations relies on the distinction between conditional probabilities, as in P(cancer. The former is a statistical notion that can be estimated by observation with negligible intervention by the experimenter, while the latter is a causal notion which is estimated in an experiment with an important controlled randomized intervention. It is specifically characteristic of quantal phenomena that observations defined by incompatible variables always involve important intervention by the experimenter, as described quantitatively by the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. In other branches of science, for example astronomy, the experimenter can often observe with negligible intervention. The theory of . One very practical result of this theory is the characterization of confounding variables, namely, a sufficient set of variables that, if adjusted for, would yield the correct causal effect between variables of interest. It can be shown that a sufficient set for estimating the causal effect of X. This criterion, called . The basic idea goes back to Sewall Wright's 1. Type 3, however, can be uniquely identified, since X. Thus, while the skeletons (the graphs stripped of arrows) of these three triplets are identical, the directionality of the arrows is partially identifiable. The same distinction applies when X. Algorithms have been developed to systematically determine the skeleton of the underlying graph and, then, orient all arrows whose directionality is dictated by the conditional independencies observed.
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