Tuesday, 5 October 2004
Cartwright's Theorem and Procedural Approach to Causality
Pawel Kawalec, Catholic U. of Lublin, Poland
12:05 pm, 817R Cathedral of Learning

Abstract:  N. Cartwright's recent results on invariance under intervention and causality (2003) are reconsidered.  The procedural approach to causality elicited in this paper and contrasted with Cartwright's apparently philosophical one unravels certain ramifications of her results.  The procedural approach seems to license only a constrained notion of intervention and in consequence the "correctness to invariance" part of Cartwright's first theorem fails for a class of cases.  The converse "invariance to correctness" part of the theorem relies heavily on modeling assumptions which prove to be difficult to validate in practice and are often buttressed by independently acquired evidence.