Stochastic Causality

Maria Carla Galavotti, Patrick Suppes, and Domenico Costantini

This volume is about causality, a topic of perennial interest in philosophy and many scientific disciplines. The focus is on probabilistic causality, which has dominated much of the recent literature on causality. The fifteen papers cover a wide variety of topics, such as the search for causal mechanisms, epistemic and metaphysical views of causality, Bayesian nets and causal dependence, and causation in the special sciences. Several papers stress the statistical analysis of probabilistic data, and the problems that have arisen in making appropriate inferences about causal relations. The last four papers address causal issues in physics, with emphasis on physical processes that are also probabilistic, in other words, stochastic processes. With this closing emphasis, the importance of stochastic causality, that is, causal analysis of stochastic processes, is stressed.

12/1/2001

ISBN (Paperback): 1575863227

ISBN (Cloth): 1575863219

Subject: Causation; Probabilities