Hostname: page-component-89b8bd64d-4ws75 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2026-05-10T20:48:42.972Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Interactive Causes: Revising the Markov Condition

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Gerhard Schurz
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This article suggests a revision of the theory of causal nets (TCN). In section 1 we introduce an axiomatization of TCN based on a realistic understanding. It is shown that the causal Markov condition entails three independent principles. In section 2 we analyze indeterministic decay as the major counterexample to one of these principles: screening off by common causes (SCC). We call SCC-violating common causes interactive causes. In section 3 we develop a revised version of TCN, called TCN*, which accounts for interactive causes. It is shown that there are interactive causal models that admit of no faithful noninteractive reconstruction.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 84 , Issue 3 , July 2017 , pp. 456 - 479
Copyright
Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

Arntzenius, Frank. 2010. “Reichenbach’s Common Cause Principle.” In Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Zalta, Edwin N.. Stanford, CA: Stanford University. http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2010/entries/physics-Rpcc/.Google Scholar
Berkson, Joseph. 1946. “Limitations of the Application of Fourfold Table Analysis to Hospital Data.” Biometrics Bulletin 2 (3): 47–53.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Cartwright, Nancy. 2007. Hunting Causes and Using Them. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Earman, John. 1986. A Primer on Determinism. Dordrecht: Reidel.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Haussman, Daniel, and Woodward, James. 1999. “Independence, Invariance, and the Causal Markov Condition.” British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 50:1–63.Google Scholar
Hitchcock, Christopher. 2010. “Probabilistic Causation.” In Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Zalta, Edwin N.. Stanford, CA: Stanford University. http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2011/entries/causation-probabilistic/.Google Scholar
Lauritzen, Steffen L., Dawid, Philip A., Larsen, B. N., and Leimer, H.-G.. 1990. “Independence Properties of Directed Markov-Fields.” Networks 20:491–505.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Näger, Paul. 2016. “The Causal Problem of Entanglement.” Synthese 193:1127–55.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Norton, John. 2008. “The Dome: An Unexpectedly Simple Failure of Determinism.” Philosophy of Science 75:786–98.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pearl, Judea. 1988. Probabilistic Reasoning in Intelligent Systems. San Francisco: Kaufmann.Google Scholar
Pearl, Judea 2000. Causality: Models, Reasoning and Inference. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Pearl, Judea 2009. Causality: Models, Reasoning and Inference. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Reichenbach, Hans. 1956. The Direction of Time. Berkeley: University of California Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Richardson, T. 2003. “Markov Properties for Acyclic Directed Mixed Graphs.” Scandinavian Journal of Statistics 30:145–57.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Salmon, Wesley. 1984. Scientific Explanation and the Causal Structure of the World. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Schurz, Gerhard, and Gebharter, Alexander. 2016. “Causality as a Theoretical Concept.” Synthese 193:1073–1103.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Spirtes, Peter, Glymour, Clark, and Scheines, Richard. 1993. Causation, Prediction, and Search. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Spirtes, Peter, Glymour, Clark, and Scheines, Richard 2000. Causation, Prediction, and Search. 2nd ed. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Van Fraassen, Bas. 1980. The Scientific Image. Oxford: Clarendon.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wood, Christopher J., and Spekkens, Robert W.. 2015. “The Lesson of Causal Discovery Algorithms for Quantum Correlations.” New Journal of Physics 17. doi:10.1088/1367-2630/17/3/033002.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Zhang, Jiji, and Spirtes, Peter. 2008. “Detection of Unfaithfulness and Robust Causal Inference.” Minds and Machines 18:239–71.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Zhang, Jiji, and Spirtes, Peter 2011. “Intervention, Determinism, and the Causal Minimality Condition.” Synthese 182 (3): 335–47.CrossRefGoogle Scholar