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The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science Advance Access originally published online on November 8, 2005
The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 2005 56(4):843-887; doi:10.1093/bjps/axi147
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© The Author (2005). Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of British Society for the Philosophy of Science. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

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

Joseph Y. Halpern

Cornell University, Department of Computer Science, Ithaca, NY 14853, USA halpern{at}cs.cornell.edu

Judea Pearl

Department of Computer Science, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA 90095, USA judea{at}cs.ucla.edu

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.

  1. Introduction
  2. Causal models: a review
    2.1 Causal models
    2.2 Syntax and semantics

  3. The definition of cause
  4. Examples
  5. A more refined definition
  6. Discussion
AAppendix: Some Technical Issues
A.1 The active causal process
A.2 A closer look at AC2(b)
A.3 Causality with infinitely many variables
A.4 Causality in nonrecursive models


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