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Can We Reduce Causal Direction to Probabilities?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 June 2023

David Papineau
David Papineau*
Affiliation:
King's College London
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Extract

This paper will be a mirror image of Huw Price's paper. Like Price, I shall first introduce the “fork asymmetry”, then consider objections to using it to analyse causal asymmetry, and finally examine the relation between causation and human agency. But where Price rejects analyses of causal asymmetry in terms of the fork asymmetry, and so turns to human agency to ground an alternative account of both the causal and fork asymmetries, I defend the fork asymmetry analysis of causation, and correspondingly want to explain agency in terms of the fork asymmetry, rather than vice versa.

Type
Part VIII. Statistical Asymmetries and the Direction of Causation
Information
PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association , Volume 1992 , Issue 2: Volume Two: Symposia and Invited Papers 1992 , 1993 , pp. 238 - 252
Copyright
Copyright © 1993 by the Philosophy of Science Association

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