Tuesday, 5 October 2004
Cartwright's Theorem and Procedural Approach to Causality
Pawel Kawalec, Catholic U. of Lublin, Poland
12:05 pm, 817R Cathedral of Learning
Abstract: N. Cartwright's recent results on invariance under
intervention and causality (2003) are reconsidered. The procedural
approach to causality elicited in this paper and contrasted with
Cartwright's apparently philosophical one unravels certain ramifications
of her results. The procedural approach seems to license only
a constrained notion of intervention and in consequence the "correctness
to invariance" part of Cartwright's first theorem fails for a class
of cases. The converse "invariance to correctness" part of
the theorem relies heavily on modeling assumptions which prove to
be difficult to validate in practice and are often buttressed by
independently acquired evidence.
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