Causation in Terms of Production
Causation in Terms of Production
Andreas, H & Günther, M 2020, ‘Causation in terms of production’, Philosophical Studies, vol. 177, 1565–1591.
In this paper, we develop a logical analysis of actual causation in terms of production. Inspired by Hall (2004, 2007), we regard production rather than counterfactual dependence to be more central to causation. We analyse the concept of production by a strengthened Ramsey Test conditional. A ≫ C iff, after suspending judgement on A and C, C is believed in the course of assuming A. We suggest that such a test allows us to (epistemically) verify or falsify that an event brings about a certain other event, and thus qualifies as a candidate cause of the latter event.
On the final analysis, production is necessary but not sufficient for causation. We amend our analysis by a weak condition of difference-making that is likewise necessary but not sufficient for causation. As a result, any cause produces its effect and is a difference-maker in the weak sense that its presence and its absence cannot bring about the same effect.
The analysis solves the problems of overdetermination, conjunctive scenarios, (early and late) preemption, and switches. To the best of our knowledge, there is no other formally well-defined account in the literature that solves the whole set of these problems.
Understanding causation is one of the crucial frontiers of discovery in artificial intelligence, where we increasingly depend on machine learning models that inadequately represent causal relations. Philosophical work analysing the nature of causation lays crucial foundations both for advancing AI itself, and for the many deployments of causal reasoning necessary to develop democratically legitimate AI.