Authors: Ilija Barukčić
Titans like Bertrand Russell or Karl Pearson warned us to keep our mathematical and statistical hands off causality and at the end David Hume too. Hume's scepticism has dominated discussion of causality in both analytic philosophy and statistical analysis for a long time. But more and more researchers are working hard on this field and trying to get rid of this positions. In so far, much of the recent philosophical or mathematical writing on causation (Ellery Eells (1991), Daniel Hausman (1998), Pearl (2000), Peter Spirtes, Clark Glymour and Richard Scheines (2000), ...) either addresses to Bayes networks, to the counterfactual approach to causality developed in detail by David Lewis, to Reichenbach's Principle of the Common Cause or to the Causal Markov Condition. None of this approaches to causation investigated the relationship between causation and the law of independence to a necessary extent. Nonetheless, the relationship between causation and the law of independence, one of the fundamental concepts in probability theory, is very important. May an effect occur in the absence of a cause? May an effect fail to occur in the presence of a cause? In so far, what does constitute the causal relation? On the other hand, if it is unclear what does constitute the causal relation, maybe we can answer the question, what does not constitute the causal relation. So far, a cause as such can not be independent from its effect and vice versa, if there is a deterministic causal relationship. This publication will prove, that the law of independence defines causation to some extent ex negativo.
Comments: 10 pages. Copyright © 2006 by Ilija Barukčić, Jever, Germany. All rights reserved. Published by:
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