Paper 47: Causes and Explanations: A Structural-Model Approach

Evan Morrison will be taking us through part of a two-part paper by Judea Pearl.

Causes and Explanations: A Structural-Model Approach — Part I: Causes

http://ftp.cs.ucla.edu/pub/stat_ser/R266-part1.pdf

Abstract

We propose a new definition of actual causes, using structural equations to model counterfactuals. We show that the definition yields a plausible and elegant account of causation that handles well examples which have caused problems for other definitions and resolves major difficulties in the traditional account.