Download or read book Questioning Causality written by Rom Harré and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2016-01-25 with total page 603 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Covering a topic applicable to fields ranging from education to health care to psychology, this book provides a broad critical analysis of the assumptions that researchers and practitioners have about causation and explains how readers can improve their thinking about causation. In virtually every laboratory, research center, or classroom focused on the social or physical sciences today, the concept of causation is a core issue to be questioned, tested, and determined. Even debates in unrelated areas such as biology, law, and philosophy often focus on causality—"What made that happen?" In this book, experts from across disciplines adopt a reader-friendly approach to reconsider this age-old question in a modern light, defining different kinds of causation and examining how causes and consequences are framed and approached in a particular field. Each chapter uses applied examples to illustrate key points in an accessible manner. The contributors to this work supply a coherent critical analysis of the assumptions researchers and practitioners hold about causation, and explain how such thinking about causation can be improved. Collectively, the coverage is broad, providing readers with a fuller picture of research in social contexts. Beyond providing insightful description and thought-provoking questioning of causation in different research areas, the book applies analysis of data in order to point the way to smarter, more efficient practices. Consequently, both practitioners and researchers will benefit from this book.

Download or read book Questioning Causality written by Rom Harré and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2016-01-25 with total page 435 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Covering a topic applicable to fields ranging from education to health care to psychology, this book provides a broad critical analysis of the assumptions that researchers and practitioners have about causation and explains how readers can improve their thinking about causation. In virtually every laboratory, research center, or classroom focused on the social or physical sciences today, the concept of causation is a core issue to be questioned, tested, and determined. Even debates in unrelated areas such as biology, law, and philosophy often focus on causality—"What made that happen?" In this book, experts from across disciplines adopt a reader-friendly approach to reconsider this age-old question in a modern light, defining different kinds of causation and examining how causes and consequences are framed and approached in a particular field. Each chapter uses applied examples to illustrate key points in an accessible manner. The contributors to this work supply a coherent critical analysis of the assumptions researchers and practitioners hold about causation, and explain how such thinking about causation can be improved. Collectively, the coverage is broad, providing readers with a fuller picture of research in social contexts. Beyond providing insightful description and thought-provoking questioning of causation in different research areas, the book applies analysis of data in order to point the way to smarter, more efficient practices. Consequently, both practitioners and researchers will benefit from this book.

Download or read book Causality written by Judea Pearl and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2009-09-14 with total page 487 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Causality offers the first comprehensive coverage of causal analysis in many sciences, including recent advances using graphical methods. Pearl presents a unified account of the probabilistic, manipulative, counterfactual and structural approaches to causation, and devises simple mathematical tools for analyzing the relationships between causal connections, statistical associations, actions and observations. The book will open the way for including causal analysis in the standard curriculum of statistics, artificial intelligence ...

Download or read book The Book of Why written by Judea Pearl and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2018-05-15 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Turing Award-winning computer scientist and statistician shows how understanding causality has revolutionized science and will revolutionize artificial intelligence "Correlation is not causation." This mantra, chanted by scientists for more than a century, has led to a virtual prohibition on causal talk. Today, that taboo is dead. The causal revolution, instigated by Judea Pearl and his colleagues, has cut through a century of confusion and established causality -- the study of cause and effect -- on a firm scientific basis. His work explains how we can know easy things, like whether it was rain or a sprinkler that made a sidewalk wet; and how to answer hard questions, like whether a drug cured an illness. Pearl's work enables us to know not just whether one thing causes another: it lets us explore the world that is and the worlds that could have been. It shows us the essence of human thought and key to artificial intelligence. Anyone who wants to understand either needs The Book of Why.

Download or read book Actual Causality written by Joseph Y. Halpern and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2016-08-12 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores actual causality, and such related notions as degree of responsibility, degree of blame, and causal explanation. The goal is to arrive at a definition of causality that matches our natural language usage and is helpful, for example, to a jury deciding a legal case, a programmer looking for the line of code that cause some software to fail, or an economist trying to determine whether austerity caused a subsequent depression.

Download or read book Causality in the Sciences written by Phyllis McKay Illari and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2011-03-17 with total page 953 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why do ideas of how mechanisms relate to causality and probability differ so much across the sciences? Can progress in understanding the tools of causal inference in some sciences lead to progress in others? This book tackles these questions and others concerning the use of causality in the sciences.

Download or read book The Why of Things written by Peter V. Rabins and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2013-08-20 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why was there a meltdown at the Fukushima power plant? Why do some people get cancer and not others? Why is global warming happening? Why does one person get depressed in the face of life's vicissitudes while another finds resilience? Questions like these—questions of causality—form the basis of modern scientific inquiry, posing profound intellectual and methodological challenges for researchers in the physical, natural, biomedical, and social sciences. In this groundbreaking book, noted psychiatrist and author Peter Rabins offers a conceptual framework for analyzing daunting questions of causality. Navigating a lively intellectual voyage between the shoals of strict reductionism and relativism, Rabins maps a three-facet model of causality and applies it to a variety of questions in science, medicine, economics, and more. Throughout this book, Rabins situates his argument within relevant scientific contexts, such as quantum mechanics, cybernetics, chaos theory, and epigenetics. A renowned communicator of complex concepts and scientific ideas, Rabins helps readers stretch their minds beyond the realm of popular literary tipping points, blinks, and freakonomic explanations of the world.

Download or read book Elements of Causal Inference written by Jonas Peters and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2017-11-29 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A concise and self-contained introduction to causal inference, increasingly important in data science and machine learning. The mathematization of causality is a relatively recent development, and has become increasingly important in data science and machine learning. This book offers a self-contained and concise introduction to causal models and how to learn them from data. After explaining the need for causal models and discussing some of the principles underlying causal inference, the book teaches readers how to use causal models: how to compute intervention distributions, how to infer causal models from observational and interventional data, and how causal ideas could be exploited for classical machine learning problems. All of these topics are discussed first in terms of two variables and then in the more general multivariate case. The bivariate case turns out to be a particularly hard problem for causal learning because there are no conditional independences as used by classical methods for solving multivariate cases. The authors consider analyzing statistical asymmetries between cause and effect to be highly instructive, and they report on their decade of intensive research into this problem. The book is accessible to readers with a background in machine learning or statistics, and can be used in graduate courses or as a reference for researchers. The text includes code snippets that can be copied and pasted, exercises, and an appendix with a summary of the most important technical concepts.

Download or read book Causal Inference written by Scott Cunningham and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2021-01-26 with total page 585 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An accessible, contemporary introduction to the methods for determining cause and effect in the Social Sciences “Causation versus correlation has been the basis of arguments—economic and otherwise—since the beginning of time. Causal Inference: The Mixtape uses legit real-world examples that I found genuinely thought-provoking. It’s rare that a book prompts readers to expand their outlook; this one did for me.”—Marvin Young (Young MC) Causal inference encompasses the tools that allow social scientists to determine what causes what. In a messy world, causal inference is what helps establish the causes and effects of the actions being studied—for example, the impact (or lack thereof) of increases in the minimum wage on employment, the effects of early childhood education on incarceration later in life, or the influence on economic growth of introducing malaria nets in developing regions. Scott Cunningham introduces students and practitioners to the methods necessary to arrive at meaningful answers to the questions of causation, using a range of modeling techniques and coding instructions for both the R and the Stata programming languages.

Download or read book Causality written by Phyllis McKay Illari and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2014 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Head hits cause brain damage - but not always. Should we ban sport to protect athletes? Exposure to electromagnetic fields is strongly associated with cancer development - does that mean exposure causes cancer? Should we encourage old fashioned communication instead of mobile phones to reduce cancer rates? According to popular wisdom, the Mediterranean diet keeps you healthy. Is this belief scientifically sound? Should public health bodies encourage consumption of fresh fruit and vegetables? Severe financial constraints on research and public policy, media pressure, and public anxiety make such questions of immense current concern not just to philosophers but to scientists, governments, public bodies, and the general public. In the last decade there has been an explosion of theorizing about causality in philosophy, and also in the sciences. This literature is both fascinating and important, but it is involved and highly technical. This makes it inaccessible to many who would like to use it, philosophers and scientists alike. This book is an introduction to philosophy of causality - one that is highly accessible: to scientists unacquainted with philosophy, to philosophers unacquainted with science, and to anyone else lost in the labyrinth of philosophical theories of causality. It presents key philosophical accounts, concepts and methods, using examples from the sciences to show how to apply philosophical debates to scientific problems.

Download or read book Causality and Explanation written by Wesley C. Salmon and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1998-01-22 with total page 454 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For over two decades Wesley Salmon has helped to shape the course of debate in philosophy of science. He is a major contributor to the philosophical discussion of problems associated with causality and the author of two influential books on scientific explanation. This long-awaited volume collects twenty- six of Salmon's essays, including seven that have never before been published and others difficult to find. Part I comprises five introductory essays that presuppose no formal training in philosophy of science and form a background for subsequent essays. Parts II and III contain Salmon's seminal work on scientific explanation and causality. Part IV offers survey articles that feature advanced material but remain accessible to those outside philosophy of science. Essays in Part V address specific issues in particular scientific disciplines, namely, archaeology and anthropology, astrophysics and cosmology, and physics. Clear, compelling, and essential, this volume offers a superb introduction to philosophy of science for nonspecialists and belongs on the bookshelf of all who carry out work in this exciting field. Wesley Salmon is renowned for his seminal contributions to the philosophy of science. He has powerfully and permanently shaped discussion of such issues as lawlike and probabilistic explanation and the interrelation of explanatory notions to causal notions. This unique volume brings together twenty-six of his essays on subjects related to causality and explanation, written over the period 1971-1995. Six of the essays have never been published before and many others have only appeared in obscure venues. The volume includes a section of accessible introductory pieces, as well as more advanced and technical pieces, and will make essential work in the philosophy of science readily available to both scholars and students.

Download or read book Causality in a Social World written by Guanglei Hong and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2015-08-17 with total page 443 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Causality in a Social World introduces innovative new statistical research and strategies for investigating moderated intervention effects, mediated intervention effects, and spill-over effects using experimental or quasi-experimental data. The book uses potential outcomes to define causal effects, explains and evaluates identification assumptions using application examples, and compares innovative statistical strategies with conventional analysis methods. Whilst highlighting the crucial role of good research design and the evaluation of assumptions required for identifying causal effects in the context of each application, the author demonstrates that improved statistical procedures will greatly enhance the empirical study of causal relationship theory. Applications focus on interventions designed to improve outcomes for participants who are embedded in social settings, including families, classrooms, schools, neighbourhoods, and workplaces.

Download or read book Commercial Motor Vehicle Driver Fatigue Long Term Health and Highway Safety written by National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine and published by National Academies Press. This book was released on 2016-09-12 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There are approximately 4,000 fatalities in crashes involving trucks and buses in the United States each year. Though estimates are wide-ranging, possibly 10 to 20 percent of these crashes might have involved fatigued drivers. The stresses associated with their particular jobs (irregular schedules, etc.) and the lifestyle that many truck and bus drivers lead, puts them at substantial risk for insufficient sleep and for developing short- and long-term health problems. Commercial Motor Vehicle Driver Fatigue, Long-Term Health and Highway Safety assesses the state of knowledge about the relationship of such factors as hours of driving, hours on duty, and periods of rest to the fatigue experienced by truck and bus drivers while driving and the implications for the safe operation of their vehicles. This report evaluates the relationship of these factors to drivers' health over the longer term, and identifies improvements in data and research methods that can lead to better understanding in both areas.

Download or read book Time and Causality across the Sciences written by Samantha Kleinberg and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-09-26 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book, geared toward academic researchers and graduate students, brings together research on all facets of how time and causality relate across the sciences. Time is fundamental to how we perceive and reason about causes. It lets us immediately rule out the sound of a car crash as its cause. That a cause happens before its effect has been a core, and often unquestioned, part of how we describe causality. Research across disciplines shows that the relationship is much more complex than that. This book explores what that means for both the metaphysics and epistemology of causes - what they are and how we can find them. Across psychology, biology, and the social sciences, common themes emerge, suggesting that time plays a critical role in our understanding. The increasing availability of large time series datasets allows us to ask new questions about causality, necessitating new methods for modeling dynamic systems and incorporating mechanistic information into causal models.

Download or read book Causality written by Phyllis Illari and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2014-10-02 with total page 493 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Head hits cause brain damage - but not always. Should we ban sport to protect athletes? Exposure to electromagnetic fields is strongly associated with cancer development - does that mean exposure causes cancer? Should we encourage old fashioned communication instead of mobile phones to reduce cancer rates? According to popular wisdom, the Mediterranean diet keeps you healthy. Is this belief scientifically sound? Should public health bodies encourage consumption of fresh fruit and vegetables? Severe financial constraints on research and public policy, media pressure, and public anxiety make such questions of immense current concern not just to philosophers but to scientists, governments, public bodies, and the general public. In the last decade there has been an explosion of theorizing about causality in philosophy, and also in the sciences. This literature is both fascinating and important, but it is involved and highly technical. This makes it inaccessible to many who would like to use it, philosophers and scientists alike. This book is an introduction to philosophy of causality - one that is highly accessible: to scientists unacquainted with philosophy, to philosophers unacquainted with science, and to anyone else lost in the labyrinth of philosophical theories of causality. It presents key philosophical accounts, concepts and methods, using examples from the sciences to show how to apply philosophical debates to scientific problems.

Download or read book Theories of Causality written by John Losee and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-28 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What types of entities qualify as causes and effects? What is the relationship between cause and effect? How are causal claims to be assessed? The first question deals with the structure of the world; the second is about theories that interpret the relationship of causes to effects; while the third has to do with proper procedure in science and everyday life. This volume is a wide-ranging history of answers that have been given to these three questions, and their relationship to scientific understanding.Losee presents a number of theories of causality within a historical survey that emphasizes the interrelationship between these theories and developments in science. His analysis displays the strengths and weaknesses of these theories so as to contribute to our present understanding of causal relatedness.Among the positions discussed are those of Aristotle, Hume, Kant, Mill, Salmon, Lewis, and Woodward. Losee's analysis displays the strengths and weaknesses of theories that identify causal relatedness with regularity of sequence, probability increase, energy transfer, exchange of a conserved quantity, counterfactual dependence, and inferability.These theories are judged, in part,by their ability to resolvedifficulties posed by instances of overdetermination,causation by omission, preventive causation, and causation by disconnection. Since applications of the theories to these instances disagree, a strategy of employing multiple concepts of causation is examined.Theories of Causality also describes the particular difficulties for causal analysis posed by quantum mechanics. One such difficulty is the prohibition against combining a causal analysis of a quantum process with a spatio-temporal description of that process.

Download or read book Perspectives on Causation written by Elitzur A. Bar-Asher Siegal and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-07-27 with total page 484 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores relationships and maps out intersections between discussions on causation in three scientific disciplines: linguistics, philosophy, and psychology. The book is organized in five thematic parts, investigating connections between philosophical and linguistic studies of causation; presenting novel methodologies for studying the representation of causation; tackling central issues in syntactic and semantic representation of causal relations; and introducing recent advances in philosophical thinking on causation. Beyond its thematic organization, readers will find several recurring topics throughout this book, such as the attempt to reduce causality to other non-causal terms; causal pluralism vs. one all-encompassing account for causation; causal relations pertaining to the mental as opposed to the physical realm, and more. This collection also lays the foundation for questioning whether it is possible to evaluate available philosophical approaches to causation against the variety of linguistic phenomena ranging across diverse lexical and grammatical items, such as bound morphemes, prepositions, connectives, and verbs. Above all, it lays the groundwork for considering whether the fruits of the psychological-cognitive study of the perception of causal relations may contribute to linguistic and philosophical studies, and whether insights from linguistics can benefit the other two disciplines.