Causes and Explanations: A Structural-Model Approach --- Part 1: Causes
This work addresses foundational issues in causality for researchers in philosophy, AI, and statistics, offering a novel approach that is not incremental.
The authors tackled the problem of defining actual causes by proposing a new definition using structural equations to model counterfactuals, resulting in a plausible and elegant account that handles problematic examples and resolves major difficulties in traditional accounts.
We propose a new definition of actual causes, using structural equations to model counterfactuals.We show that the definitions yield a plausible and elegant account ofcausation that handles well examples which have caused problems forother definitions and resolves major difficulties in the traditionalaccount. In a companion paper, we show how the definition of causality can beused to give an elegant definition of (causal) explanation.