Time and Causality Across the Sciences

Time and Causality Across the Sciences PDF Author: Samantha Kleinberg
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108476678
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 273

Get Book Here

Book Description
Explores the critical role time plays in our understanding of causality, across psychology, biology, physics and the social sciences.

Time and Causality Across the Sciences

Time and Causality Across the Sciences PDF Author: Samantha Kleinberg
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108476678
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 273

Get Book Here

Book Description
Explores the critical role time plays in our understanding of causality, across psychology, biology, physics and the social sciences.

Causality in the Sciences

Causality in the Sciences PDF Author: Phyllis McKay Illari
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199574138
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 953

Get Book Here

Book Description
Why do ideas of how mechanisms relate to causality and probability differ so much across the sciences? Can progress in understanding the tools of causal inference in some sciences lead to progress in others? This book tackles these questions and others concerning the use of causality in the sciences.

Time and Causality across the Sciences

Time and Causality across the Sciences PDF Author: Samantha Kleinberg
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108756018
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 273

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book, geared toward academic researchers and graduate students, brings together research on all facets of how time and causality relate across the sciences. Time is fundamental to how we perceive and reason about causes. It lets us immediately rule out the sound of a car crash as its cause. That a cause happens before its effect has been a core, and often unquestioned, part of how we describe causality. Research across disciplines shows that the relationship is much more complex than that. This book explores what that means for both the metaphysics and epistemology of causes - what they are and how we can find them. Across psychology, biology, and the social sciences, common themes emerge, suggesting that time plays a critical role in our understanding. The increasing availability of large time series datasets allows us to ask new questions about causality, necessitating new methods for modeling dynamic systems and incorporating mechanistic information into causal models.

Experimental Political Science and the Study of Causality

Experimental Political Science and the Study of Causality PDF Author: Rebecca B. Morton
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139490532
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 607

Get Book Here

Book Description
Increasingly, political scientists use the term 'experiment' or 'experimental' to describe their empirical research. One of the primary reasons for doing so is the advantage of experiments in establishing causal inferences. In this book, Rebecca B. Morton and Kenneth C. Williams discuss in detail how experiments and experimental reasoning with observational data can help researchers determine causality. They explore how control and random assignment mechanisms work, examining both the Rubin causal model and the formal theory approaches to causality. They also cover general topics in experimentation such as the history of experimentation in political science; internal and external validity of experimental research; types of experiments - field, laboratory, virtual, and survey - and how to choose, recruit, and motivate subjects in experiments. They investigate ethical issues in experimentation, the process of securing approval from institutional review boards for human subject research, and the use of deception in experimentation.

The Book of Why

The Book of Why PDF Author: Judea Pearl
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 0465097618
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 465

Get Book Here

Book Description
A Turing Award-winning computer scientist and statistician shows how understanding causality has revolutionized science and will revolutionize artificial intelligence "Correlation is not causation." This mantra, chanted by scientists for more than a century, has led to a virtual prohibition on causal talk. Today, that taboo is dead. The causal revolution, instigated by Judea Pearl and his colleagues, has cut through a century of confusion and established causality -- the study of cause and effect -- on a firm scientific basis. His work explains how we can know easy things, like whether it was rain or a sprinkler that made a sidewalk wet; and how to answer hard questions, like whether a drug cured an illness. Pearl's work enables us to know not just whether one thing causes another: it lets us explore the world that is and the worlds that could have been. It shows us the essence of human thought and key to artificial intelligence. Anyone who wants to understand either needs The Book of Why.

Causality, Probability, and Time

Causality, Probability, and Time PDF Author: Samantha Kleinberg
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107026482
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 269

Get Book Here

Book Description
Presents a new approach to causal inference and explanation, addressing both the timing and complexity of relationships.

Causality and Causal Modelling in the Social Sciences

Causality and Causal Modelling in the Social Sciences PDF Author: Federica Russo
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 1402088175
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 236

Get Book Here

Book Description
This investigation into causal modelling presents the rationale of causality, i.e. the notion that guides causal reasoning in causal modelling. It is argued that causal models are regimented by a rationale of variation, nor of regularity neither invariance, thus breaking down the dominant Human paradigm. The notion of variation is shown to be embedded in the scheme of reasoning behind various causal models. It is also shown to be latent – yet fundamental – in many philosophical accounts. Moreover, it has significant consequences for methodological issues: the warranty of the causal interpretation of causal models, the levels of causation, the characterisation of mechanisms, and the interpretation of probability. This book offers a novel philosophical and methodological approach to causal reasoning in causal modelling and provides the reader with the tools to be up to date about various issues causality rises in social science.

Causation in Science

Causation in Science PDF Author: Yemima Ben-Menahem
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400889294
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 221

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book explores the role of causal constraints in science, shifting our attention from causal relations between individual events--the focus of most philosophical treatments of causation—to a broad family of concepts and principles generating constraints on possible change. Yemima Ben-Menahem looks at determinism, locality, stability, symmetry principles, conservation laws, and the principle of least action—causal constraints that serve to distinguish events and processes that our best scientific theories mandate or allow from those they rule out. Ben-Menahem's approach reveals that causation is just as relevant to explaining why certain events fail to occur as it is to explaining events that do occur. She investigates the conceptual differences between, and interrelations of, members of the causal family, thereby clarifying problems at the heart of the philosophy of science. Ben-Menahem argues that the distinction between determinism and stability is pertinent to the philosophy of history and the foundations of statistical mechanics, and that the interplay of determinism and locality is crucial for understanding quantum mechanics. Providing historical perspective, she traces the causal constraints of contemporary science to traditional intuitions about causation, and demonstrates how the teleological appearance of some constraints is explained away in current scientific theories such as quantum mechanics. Causation in Science represents a bold challenge to both causal eliminativism and causal reductionism—the notions that causation has no place in science and that higher-level causal claims are reducible to the causal claims of fundamental physics.

The Fundamentals of Political Science Research

The Fundamentals of Political Science Research PDF Author: Paul M. Kellstedt
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 052187517X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 293

Get Book Here

Book Description
This textbook introduces the scientific study of politics, supplying students with the basic tools to be critical consumers and producers of scholarly research.

Actual Causality

Actual Causality PDF Author: Joseph Y. Halpern
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262537133
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 240

Get Book Here

Book Description
A new approach for defining causality and such related notions as degree of responsibility, degrees of blame, and causal explanation. Causality plays a central role in the way people structure the world; we constantly seek causal explanations for our observations. But what does it even mean that an event C “actually caused” event E? The problem of defining actual causation goes beyond mere philosophical speculation. For example, in many legal arguments, it is precisely what needs to be established in order to determine responsibility. The philosophy literature has been struggling with the problem of defining causality since Hume. In this book, Joseph Halpern explores actual causality, and such related notions as degree of responsibility, degree of blame, and causal explanation. The goal is to arrive at a definition of causality that matches our natural language usage and is helpful, for example, to a jury deciding a legal case, a programmer looking for the line of code that cause some software to fail, or an economist trying to determine whether austerity caused a subsequent depression. Halpern applies and expands an approach to causality that he and Judea Pearl developed, based on structural equations. He carefully formulates a definition of causality, and building on this, defines degree of responsibility, degree of blame, and causal explanation. He concludes by discussing how these ideas can be applied to such practical problems as accountability and program verification. Technical details are generally confined to the final section of each chapter and can be skipped by non-mathematical readers.