Transitivity and Proportionality in Causation

It is commonly assumed that causation is transitive and in this paper I aim to reconcile this widely-held assumption with apparent evidence to the contrary. I will discuss a familiar approach to certain well-known counterexamples, before introducing a more resistant sort of case of my own. I will then offer a novel solution, based on Yablo’s proportionality principle, that succeeds in even these more resistant cases. There is a catch, however. Either proportionality is a constraint on which causal claims are true, and the solution works, or it is not and causation is not transitive after all. I will argue that the first horn has unacceptable consequences and should be rejected, but that the second horn is less costly than it might initially appear

The Deviance in Deviant Causal Chains

Causal theories of action, perception and knowledge are each beset by problems of so-called ‘deviant’ causal chains. For each such theory, counterexamples are formed using odd or co-incidental causal chains to establish that the theory is committed to unpalatable claims about some intentional action, about a case of veridical perception or about the acquisition of genuine knowledge. In this paper I will argue that three well-known examples of a deviant causal chain have something in common: they each violate Yablos proportionality constraint on causation. I will argue that this constraint provides the key to saving causal theories from deviant chains

Events and their counterparts

This paper argues that a counterpart-theoretic treatment of events, combined with a counterfactual theory of causation, can help resolve three puzzles from the causation literature. First, CCT traces the apparent contextual shifts in our causal attributions to shifts in the counterpart relation which obtains in those contexts. Second, being sensitive to shifts in the counterpart relation can help diagnose what goes wrong in certain prominent examples where the transitivity of causation appears to fail. Third, CCT can help us resurrect the much-maligned fragility response to the problems of late pre-emption by understanding fragility in counterpart-theoretic terms. Some reasons to prefer this CCT approach to rivals are discusse

Banking on Indigenous communities: Issues, options, and Australian and international best practice

The ability of people to manage and budget their incomes, arrange to pay third parties, purchase food, goods and services, and maintain a level of financial and economic independence and planning, all rely on maintaining informed access to appropriate banking and financial services. The rhetoric of economic independence is commonly employed as a laudable objective for Indigenous peoples. However, there is little evidence of systematic attention being applied to ensuring Indigenous Australians can even enjoy equitable levels of access to those essential banking and financial services that are taken for granted by other Australians (Reconciliation Australia Strategic Plan 2001–2003)

Giving credit where it's due: the delivery of banking and financial services to Indigenous Australians in rural and remote areas

Australia's financial system is undergoing a period of substantial structural change. A number of interrelated factors are implicated: changes in the competitive forces within the sector, the introduction of new technology, and changing consumer demands. While these changes may have had positive impacts on most consumers, they have had a number of negative impacts, particularly for low-income consumers of financial services and for people located in rural and remote communities. This Discussion Paper (218) and the one following (219) will analyse the proposition that an alternative model for the delivery of financial services or re-regulation of the financial sector is required to protect the interests of low-income groups and, in particular, Indigenous people. The argument is based on an understanding of the impact of the deregulation of the financial sector on the delivery of banking services to low-income groups and to people located in rural and remote communities. Indigenous people make up a significant proportion of both of these groups. It is argued that deregulation has had a profound impact on Indigenous people, both because of their historical lack of equitable access to financial services, and their comparatively low socioeconomic status. Supply of financial services to rural and remote communities within Australia is currently in decline. This paper explores current banking and financial services in the context of Australia's financial system, the current supply of banking and financial services to rural and remote communities, and the impact that the lack of access to these services has on the relatively increasing Indigenous populations of these communities. Work by Westbury has detailed the specific problems faced by Indigenous people in the Barwon-Darling region. These include: the failure of financial providers to take account of the different conceptions that Indigenous people have of financial facilities; the problems caused by the inadequate provision of banking and financial services within the region; · the fact that many Indigenous people do not understand either the way bank fees and charges operate, or how to minimise these fees and charges; and · the low technical proficiency of many Indigenous people. In addition Indigenous people want banking services to be provided on a personal, private, face-to-face basis, by Indigenous staff. If these requirements are to be met, alternatives to the current delivery of banking and financial services to rural and remote Indigenous communities will have to be considered

Virtual reality: Digital or fictional?

Are the objects and events that take place in Virtual Reality genuinely real? Those who answer this question in the affirmative are realists, and those who answer in the negative are irrealists. In this paper we argue against the realist position, as given by Chalmers (2017), and present our own preferred irrealist account of the virtual. We start by disambiguat- ing two potential versions of the realist position—weak and strong— and then go on to argue that neither is plausible. We then introduce a Waltonian variety of fictionalism about the virtual, arguing that this sort of irrealist approach avoids the problems of the realist positions, fits with a unifying theory of representational works, and offers a better ac- count of the phenomenology of engaging in virtual experiences

Counterfactuals and counterparts: defending a neo-Humean theory of causation

Whether there exist causal relations between guns firing and people dying, between pedals pressed and cars accelerating, or between carbon dioxide emissions and global warming, is typically taken to be a mind-independent, objective, matter of fact. However, recent contributions to the literature on causation, in particular theories of contrastive causation and causal modelling, have undermined this central causal platitude by relativising causal facts to models or to interests. This thesis flies against the prevailing wind by arguing that we must pay greater attention to which elements of our causal talk vary with context and which elements track genuine features of the world around us. I will argue that once these elements are teased apart we will be in a position to better understand some of the most persistent problems in the philosophy of causation: pre-emption cases, absence causation, failures of transitivity and overdetermination. The result is a naturalist account of causation, concordant with the contextual variability we find in our ordinary causal talk, and parsimonious with respect to the theoretical entities posited

Causal exclusion and the limits of proportionality

Causal exclusion arguments are taken to threaten the autonomy of the special sciences, and the causal efficacy of mental properties. A recent line of response to these arguments has appealed to “independently plausible” and “well grounded” theories of causation to rebut key premises. In this paper I consider two papers which proceed in this vein and show that they share a common feature: they both require causes to be proportional (in Yablo’s sense) to their effects. I argue that this feature is a bug, and one that generalises: any attempt to rescue the autonomy of the special sciences, or the efficacy of the mental, from exclusion worries had better not look to proportionality for help

The Philosophy of X in XAI

Explanation is a topic in its own right in philosophy, and a topic of newfound interest in AI research given the need in some domains for explainable AI (XAI). This paper traces some of the progress in the philosophical discourse and applies to a realistic application of AI where explanation is required. The aim is to show that philosophy may be of use in the search for the X in XAI