Abstract
We point to several kinds of knowledge that play an important role in controversial examples of actual causation. One is knowledge about the causal mechanisms in the domain and the causal processes that result from them. Another is knowledge of what conditions trigger such mechanisms and what conditions can make them fail.
We argue that to solve questions of actual causation, such knowledge needs to be made explicit. To this end, we develop a new language in the family of CP-logic, in which causal mechanisms and causal processes are formal objects. We then build a framework for actual causation in which various “production” notions of actual causation are defined. Contrary to counterfactual definitions, these notions are defined directly in terms of the (formal) causal process that causes the possible world.
Bart Bogaerts is a postdoctoral fellow of the Research Foundation – Flanders (FWO).
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- 1.
A more intuitive structural equation for the second scenario is \(Arsenic \vee (\lnot Arsenic \wedge Strychnine)\). It is equivalent under standard semantics to the original equation. Nevertheless, it suggests an alternative way to resolve the ambiguity: developing a more refined semantics that distinguishes between the two equations. We suspect that structural equations under such a refined semantics might turn out to be quite similar to the logic we develop in this paper.
- 2.
Information on different mechanisms, and triggering conditions versus enabling conditions.
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Acknowledgements
We thank Alexander Bochman, Sander Beckers, Jorge Fandinno, Mathieu Beirlaen, and anonymous reviewers for many discussions and valuable feedback.
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Denecker, M., Bogaerts, B., Vennekens, J. (2019). Explaining Actual Causation in Terms of Possible Causal Processes. In: Calimeri, F., Leone, N., Manna, M. (eds) Logics in Artificial Intelligence. JELIA 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11468. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19570-0_14
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