What assumptions and methods allow us to turn observations into causal knowledge, and how can even incomplete causal knowledge be used in planning and prediction to influence and control our environment? In this book Peter Spirtes, Clark Glymour, and Richard Scheines address these questions using the formalism of Bayes networks, with results that have been applied in diverse areas of research in the social, behavioral, and physical sciences. The authors show that although experimental and observational study designs may not always permit the same inferences, they are subject to uniform principles. They axiomatize the connection between causal structure and probabilistic independence, explore several varieties of causal indistinguishability, formulate a theory of manipulation, and develop asymptotically reliable procedures for searching over equivalence classes of causal models, including models of categorical data and structural equation models with and without latent variables. The authors show that the relationship between causality and probability can also help to clarify such diverse topics in statistics as the comparative power of experimentation versus observation, Simpson's paradox, errors in regression models, retrospective versus prospective sampling, and variable selection. The second edition contains a new introduction and an extensive survey of advances and applications that have appeared since the first edition was published in 1993.

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Causation, prediction, and search

Evolutionary psychology is one of many biologically informed approaches to the study of human behavior. Along with cognitive psychologists, evolutionary psychologists propose that much, if not all, of our behavior can be explained by appeal to internal psychological mechanisms. What distinguishes evolutionary psychologists from many cognitive psychologists is the proposal that the relevant internal mechanisms are adaptations—products of natural selection—that helped our ancestors get around the world, survive and reproduce. To understand the central claims of evolutionary psychology we require an understanding of some key concepts in evolutionary biology, cognitive psychology, philosophy of science and philosophy of mind. Philosophers are interested in evolutionary psychology for a number of reasons. For philosophers of science —mostly philosophers of biology—evolutionary psychology provides a critical target. There is a broad consensus among philosophers of science that evolutionary psychology is a deeply flawed enterprise. For philosophers of mind and cognitive science evolutionary psychology has been a source of empirical hypotheses about cognitive architecture and specific components of that architecture. Philosophers of mind are also critical of evolutionary psychology but their criticisms are not as all-encompassing as those presented by philosophers of biology. Evolutionary psychology is also invoked by philosophers interested in moral psychology both as a source of empirical hypotheses and as a critical target.

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Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/25331/0000776.pdf?sequence=1

Schema induction and analogical transfer

Explanation in artificial intelligence: Insights from the social sciences

I. PRELIMINARIES 1. Two Concepts of Mind 2. Supervenience and Explanation II. THE IRREDUCIBILITY OF CONSCIOUSNESS 3. Can Consciousness be Reductively Explained? 4. Naturalistic Dualism 5. The Paradox of Phenomenal Judgment III. TOWARD A THEORY OF CONSCIOUSNESS 6. The Coherence between Consciousness and Cognition 7. Absent Qualia, Fading Qualia, Dancing Qualia 8. Consciousness and Information: Some Speculation IV. APPLICATIONS 9. Strong Artificial Intelligence 10. The Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics Notes Bibliography

The conscious mind: in search of a fundamental theory

The cement of the universe

The title of this work is to be taken seriously: it is a small book for teaching students to read the language of determinism. Some prior knowledge of college-level mathematics and physics is presupposed, but otherwise the book is suitable for use in an advanced undergraduate or beginning graduate course in the philosophy of science. While writing I had in mind primarily a philosophical audience, but I hope that students and colleagues from the sciences will also find the treatment of scientific issues of interest. Though modest in not trying to reach beyond an introductory level of analysis, the work is decidedly immodest in trying to change a number of misimpressions that pervade the philosophical literature. For example, when told that classical physics is not the place to look for clean and unproblematic examples of determinism, most philosophers react with a mixture of disbelief and incomprehension. The misconcep tions on which that reaction is based can and must be changed."

A Primer on Determinism

Bayes' Bayesianism the machinery of modern Bayesianism success stories challenges met the problem of old evidence the rationality and objectivity of scientific inference a plea for eliminative induction normal science, scientific revolutions, and all that - Thomas Bayes versus Thomas Kuhn Bayesianism versus formal-learning theory a dialogue.

Bayes or Bust? A Critical Examination of Bayesian Confirmation Theory

Spacetime substantivalism leads to a radical form of indeterminism within a very broad class of spacetime theories which include our best spacetime theory, general relativity. Extending an argument from Einstein, we show that spacetime substantivalists are committed to very many more distinct physical states than these theories' equations can determine, even with the most extensive boundary conditions.

John Earman

Papers

The cement of the universe

A Primer on Determinism

Bayes or Bust? A Critical Examination of Bayesian Confirmation Theory

What Price Spacetime Substantivalism? The Hole Story

Bayes or Bust?-A Critical Examination of Bayesian Confirmation Theory.