Conditioning and Intervening

We consider the dispute between causal decision theorists and evidential decision theorists over Newcomb-like problems. We introduce a framework relating causation and directed graphs developed by Spirtes et al. (1993) and evaluate several arguments in this context. We argue that much of the debate between the two camps is misplaced; the disputes turn on the distinction between conditioning on an event E as against conditioning on an event I which is an action to bring about E. We give the essential machinery for calculating the effect of an intervention and consider recent work which extends the basic account given here to the case where causal Knowledge is incomplete.

• Publication year

  1994

• Venue

  British Journal for the Philosophy of Science

• Publication date

  1994-12-01

• Fields of study

  Sociology, Philosophy

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1093/bjps/45.4.1001
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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