Graded Causation and Defaults
This work addresses a foundational issue in philosophy and computer science for improving causal reasoning, but it appears incremental as it builds on existing suggestions without claiming broad SOTA impact.
The paper tackles the problem of incorporating defaults, typicality, and normality into accounts of actual causation by developing a formal framework that treats causation as graded and comparative, and demonstrates its application to standard cases.
Recent work in psychology and experimental philosophy has shown that judgments of actual causation are often influenced by consideration of defaults, typicality, and normality. A number of philosophers and computer scientists have also suggested that an appeal to such factors can help deal with problems facing existing accounts of actual causation. This paper develops a flexible formal framework for incorporating defaults, typicality, and normality into an account of actual causation. The resulting account takes actual causation to be both graded and comparative. We then show how our account would handle a number of standard cases.