Causal Argument Research Articles

Treatment of Pulmonary Embolism Is All About Relieving Obstruction? N.O., It Is Not!*

Pulmonary embolism (PE) is a common clinical entity seen by clinicians in a myriad of treatment arenas (1). Fortunately, PE infrequently leads to death in low risk, hemodynamically stable patients with normal right ventricular (RV) function (2). However, when PE is the driver of acute RV dysfunction or shock, mortality sharply increases (3). It is this patient that is most concerning to intensivists. A PubMed search of “pulmonary embolism” or “pulmonary embolism AND treatment” will reveal a nondigestible number of publications. Despite this, the management principles in general remain the same: judicious manipulation of preload, maintenance of pressure and perfusion to the right ventricle, augmentation of cardiac output with inotropes and inodilators, avoidance of further RV afterload increase (e.g. hypoxia and acidosis), RV afterload reduction, and treatment of the clot itself. Despite thrombolytic therapy, a small but significant portion of patients will not improve (4). This highlights the fact that the increase in RV afterload seen in acute PE is much more complex than mechanical obstruction from clot, and active pulmonary vasoconstriction plays an integral role in the hemodynamics of acute PE (4, 5). Well known in this interplay is the role of nitric oxide (NO) in maintaining low pulmonary tone for the RV to work against (5, 6). The authors hypothesize that it is perhaps hemolysis, from PE itself as well as treatment of PE, that leads to the release of cell-free hemoglobin, which can scavenge NO quite efficiently (7). It is under this backdrop that, in this issue of Critical Care Medicine, Sertorio et al conducted their physiologic study revolving around the role that cell-free hemoglobin and NO consumption play in the sometimes, anomalous hemodynamic findings of acute PE (8). In the first part of the study, the authors used a large animal model (n = 14 lambs) to assess the role of cell-free hemoglobin in NO consumption. The animals were randomized to three groups: sham, embolism with autologous blood clot, and embolism with microspheres. Each animal had continuous hemodynamic monitoring with arterial and pulmonary artery catheters, and sedation and paralysis maintained with ketamine, midazolam, and pancuronium. Blood samples were obtained at baseline, 30, and 180 minutes to measure plasma levels of cell-free hemoglobin and NO consumption. As hypothesized, lung embolization increased both cell-free hemoglobin concentrations and NO consumption. Further, there was a significant correlation between cell-free hemoglobin concentration and NO consumption. Expected hemodynamic changes paralleled these findings. With similar objectives, the authors went to the bedside and compared cell-free hemoglobin and NO consumption in healthy historical controls (n = 28) with two groups of PE patients treated with thrombolytic therapy (n = 14). The main inclusion criteria included documented PE with systolic blood pressure less than 90 or “stable” hemodynamics with RV dysfunction (or a surrogate thereof). Similar results were obtained in these human data: in patients with embolism, both cell-free hemoglobin concentration and NO consumption were greater than in control, with a significant correlation between the two. This study has some attractive strengths. The authors have taken preclinical data and sound physiologic rationale and taken it two steps further. The similar results across the animal model and small human trial seem to show that the authors are on to something. Their results are also consistent with other disease states associated with the decompartmentalization of hemoglobin as well (9). Consistency across methodologies lends strength to the argument for causality. As does biologic plausibility and strength of association. These results seem to show a strong correlation between cell-free hemoglobin and NO consumption, supporting the authors’ hypothesis in acute PE. The relevance here was also enhanced by including patients most concerning to intensivists: PE patients in shock and/or with RV dysfunction. Most of the weaknesses lie in the human arm of the study. The small numbers here make establishing cause–effect impossible. It should be noted that this was not necessarily the aim of this physiologic study. All patients were Caucasian; therefore, extrapolation of these data to other races, which may have genetic differences in NO kinetics, is impossible. There is also a lack of detail concerning very significant comorbid conditions for a study such as this: heart failure, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, or any hematologic conditions that may predispose to hemolysis (e.g., sickle cell). Although the animal arm of the study seems to show a temporal relationship to NO kinetics and expected hemodynamic changes, we know nothing about the hemodynamics in the humans or when they were studied in their disease course. Is it possible that the increase in cell-free hemoglobin and NO consumption was associated with absolutely no change in pulmonary pressures *See also p. e118.

Does the Interventionist Notion of Causation Deliver Us from the Fear of Epiphenomenalism?

This article reviews the causal exclusion argument and confronts it with some recently proposed refutations based on the interventionist account of causation. I first show that there are several technical and interpretative difficulties in applying the interventionist account to the exclusion issue. Different ways of accommodating the two to one another are considered and all are shown to leave the issue without a fully satisfactory resolution. Lastly, I argue that, on the most consistent construal, the interventionist approach can provide grounds for thinking that higher-level causal notions are as legitimate as lower-level causal notions, but it does not provide grounds for postulating inter-level causal interactions.

Learning in the European Union: theoretical lenses and meta-theory

The European Union may well be a learning organization, yet there is still confusion about the nature of learning, its causal structure and the normative implications. In this contribution we select four perspectives that address complexity, governance, the agency–structure nexus, and how learning occurs or may be blocked by institutional features. They are transactional theory, purposeful opportunism, experimental governance and the joint decision trap. We use the four cases to investigate how history and disciplinary traditions inform theory; the core causal arguments about learning; the normative implications of the analysis; the types of learning that are theoretically predicted; the meta-theoretical aspects and the lessons for better theories of the policy process and political scientists more generally.

'A Succession of Feelings, in and of Itself, is Not a Feeling of Succession'

Variants of the slogan that a succession of experiences (in and of itself) does not amount to an experience of succession are commonplace in the philosophical literature on temporal experience. I distinguish three quite different arguments that might be captured using this slogan: the individuation argument, the unity argument, and the causal argument. Versions of the unity and the causal argument are often invoked in support of a particular view of the nature of temporal experience sometimes called intentionalism, and against a rival view sometimes called extensionalism. I examine these arguments in light of the individuation argument. In particular, I show that the individuation argument is, at least prima facie, neutral between those two views of temporal experience; and once the individuation argument is in place, the unity and causal argument also lose their force against extensionalism.

Radio to gamma-ray variability study of blazar S5 0716+714

We present the results of a series of radio, optical, X-ray and gamma-ray observations of the BL Lac object S50716+714 carried out between April 2007 and January 2011. The multi-frequency observations were obtained using several ground and space based facilities. The intense optical monitoring of the source reveals faster repetitive variations superimposed on a long-term variability trend at a time scale of ~350 days. Episodes of fast variability recur on time scales of ~ 60-70 days. The intense and simultaneous activity at optical and gamma-ray frequencies favors the SSC mechanism for the production of the high-energy emission. Two major low-peaking radio flares were observed during this high optical/gamma-ray activity period. The radio flares are characterized by a rising and a decaying stage and are in agreement with the formation of a shock and its evolution. We found that the evolution of the radio flares requires a geometrical variation in addition to intrinsic variations of the source. Different estimates yield a robust and self-consistent lower limits of \delta > 20 and equipartition magnetic field B_eq > 0.36 G. Causality arguments constrain the size of emission region \theta < 0.004 mas. We found a significant correlation between flux variations at radio frequencies with those at optical and gamma-rays. The optical/GeV flux variations lead the radio variability by ~65 days. The longer time delays between low-peaking radio outbursts and optical flares imply that optical flares are the precursors of radio ones. An orphan X-ray flare challenges the simple, one-zone emission models, rendering them too simple. Here we also describe the spectral energy distribution modeling of the source from simultaneous data taken through different activity periods.

Bureaucratic Representation and Ethnic Bureaucratic Drift

The article combines research on postconflict management with public administration research by presenting a single case study on the United Nations interim administration in Kosovo. To investigate the reasons for the UN mission’s failure to implement its policies on minority relations, the study turns toward local municipal bureaucracies and offers a two-part causal argument that derives from principal–agent theory and bureaucratic representation theory. First, due to a lack of political and administrative oversight by Kosovar institutions and the UN peacebuilding mission, local municipal authorities experienced a high degree of autonomy. Second, those units within municipal administrations that were responsible for minority policy implementation did not include minority bureaucrats who could have acted as their communities’ advocates. In the absence of such active representation and a lack of top-down supervision, the municipal civil service departed from its mandate to implement affirmative policies serving the Serb and Roma community in Kosovo. The article finds that this ethnic bureaucratic drift constitutes a central explanation for the lack of minority policy implementation in Kosovo between 2001 and 2008.

Conspiracy Accounts as Intergroup Theories: Challenging Dominant Understandings of Social Power and Political Legitimacy

Conspiracy accounting is often regarded as an atypical, pathological form of political reasoning, and little research has considered how ordinary social actors may refer to political conspiracies in the course of argument. In this article, we consider the spontaneous use of conspiracy narratives by politically engaged Greek citizens in interview discussions of the Macedonian crisis. Analysis revealed that conspiracy narratives were typically used to challenge dominant representations that attributed the Macedonian crisis to Greek xenophobic nationalism. Specifically, conspiracy accounts were used to dispute assumptions concerning Greece's majority status by representing the political opposition as a consortium rather than a single out‐group, by recasting the threat posed to Greece as a matter of realistic rather than symbolic competition, and by extending the historical frame of reference to encompass past and prospective future threats to the Greek people and the Greek state. In conclusion, we note how the use of conspiratorial reasoning may be used to construct complex causal arguments concerning intergroup relations and to challenge dominant ideological assumptions about social hierarchy and political legitimacy. In this respect, conspiratorial reasoning might be regarded as a prototypical form of intergroup representation.

Birth-Related Brain Injuries: Torts in Trouble

Ever more obstetricians face litigation when a baby is born with neurologic brain injury (cerebral palsy). They are accused of negligent obstetrical care because they failed to timely recognize the development of asphyxia in the child during labour and failed or were too late to take appropriate actions. For the claimants, these trials are often successful thus creating a huge financial burden for the indemnity insurance companies; it has grown into a true childbirth litigation industry. The arguments for negligence and causality as presented in favour of the claimants by experts however are based on an obsolete theory of the genesis of brain injuries – the asphyxia hypothesis. Yet the obstetrical profession is reluctant to accept and defend the new views because the old view has become deeply entrenched in practice, especially by the wide use of an overrated diagnostic technology based on the old view.This problem area offers an exciting view on the practice of tort law, the professional legal and medical responsibilities and their interaction and should inspire deep reflections in both scientific communities.

WHY INTERWAR LITHUANIA DID LOSE VILNIUS AND CONTEMPORARY LITHUANIA LAGS BEHIND ESTONIA?

Straipsnyje lyginamas nacionalinių pinigų įvedimas ir stabilizacija Pirmojoje ir Antrojoje Lietuvos Respublikose (LR I ir LR II). Šie diachroniniai palyginimai papildomi sinchroniniais – LR I lyginama su Estija, Latvija ir Lenkija, o LR II – su Estija ir Latvija, gretimomis šalimis, kurios vienu metu sprendė nacionalinės valstybės kūrimo ir makroekonominės stabilizacijos problemas. Ir vienoje, ir kitoje epochoje LR paskutinė įsivedė nacionalinius pinigus, nors tarpukariu tik Latvija aplenkė Lietuvą tuos pinigus galutinai stabilizuodama. Palyginimų tikslas yra išaiškinti LR vėlavimo priežastis ir jo padarinius. Pirmiausia išryškinami LR I ir LR II ekonominės situacijos pirmaisiais nepriklausomybės metais panašumai ir skirtumai. Išryškinant panašumus, parodoma, kad sovietinio komandinio-administracinio ūkio prototipas buvo Pirmojo pasaulinio karo laikų kaizerinės Vokietijos karinė administracinė ekonomika, kurios poligonu tapo Oberosto kraštas (apėmęs ir šiuolaikinės Lietuvos teritoriją), kur administracinė ūkinės veiklos kontrolė įgijo griežčiausias formas. Grįžimą prie kapitalistinės laisvosios rinkos ekonomikos ir makroekonominės pusiausvyros atkūrimą ankstyvuoju tarpukariu sukomplikavo nepaprastosios išlaidos nepriklausomybės karams, dar tik besikuriančioms nacionalinėms valstybėms neturint administracinių gebėjimų surinkti tradicinio tipo mokesčius. Visos Lietuvos kaimynės nepriklausomybės karus finansavo infliaciniu mokesčiu, pačioje nepriklausomybės pradžioje įsivedusios nacionalinius pinigus ir iki 2/3 visų valstybės pajamų gaudamos iš senjoražo. Vos ne tarp visų nepriklausomybės karus moderniaisiais laikais kariavusių šalių LR I unikali savo monetarine „neoliberalia iki neoliberalizmo“ finansų politika, išsivertusi be senjoražo pajamų, padovanotų Vokietijai, su kuria Lietuva iki pat 1922 m. išlaikė pinigų sąjungą. Nepriklausomybės atkūrimo laikais delsimą nutraukti pinigų sąjungą su buvusiu imperiniu siuzerenu (Rusija) lėmė Gedimino Vagnoriaus vyriausybės pasirinkimas ir po tarptautinio LR II nepriklausomybės pripažinimo 1991 m. rudenį tęsti pirmoje tų metų pusėje pasiteisinusias infliacijos lenktynes, kuriose išlošdavo sparčiausiai atlyginimus ir kainas keliančios rublio zonos narės. Taigi dėl taupios LR I finansų politikos ankstyvojo tarpukario Lietuva kentėjo tik dėl importuojamos iš Vokietijos infliacijos, atsikovojusi nepriklausomybę ir toliau išlaidavusi Lietuva infliaciją iš Rusijos ir importavo, ir eksportavo. 1992 m. rudenį talonui tapus vienintele teisėta mokėjimo priemone, LR II vyriausybė dar aštuonis mėnesius savo išlaidoms dengti naudojo infliacinį mokestį, vykdydama moraliai nepateisinamą taikos sąlygomis finansų politiką, kuri dėl masinės privatizacijos vykdymo artimomis hiperinfliacijai sąlygomis turėjo pragaištingų ilgalaikių padarinių Lietuvos ekonominei raidai – nulėmė jos didėjantį atsilikimą nuo Estijos. O tarpukario nepriklausomybės pradžios LR I vyriausybės padarė strateginę klaidą, atsisakydamos infliacinio mokesčio nepaprastosioms nepriklausomybės karo išlaidoms finansuoti. Jis mažiau gyventojų turinčioms ir ne mažiau už Lietuvą nuo Pirmojo pasaulinio karo veiksmų nukentėjusioms Estijai ir Latvijai davė išteklių mobilizuoti apie 70 000 vyrų kariuomenes. Vykdydama neadekvačią karo sąlygoms taupią ir atsakingą finansų politiką, valstietiškai šykšti Lietuva 1920 m. rudenį turėjo tik apie 30 000 vyrų kariuomenę, kuri buvo per maža ir silpna apginti Vilnių nuo vienos dvarponiškai išlaidžios Lenkijos (kuri kaip ir kitos Lietuvos kaimynės savo 1918–1920 m. karus finansavo iš infliacinio mokesčio pajamų) tariamai sukilusios divizijos.

Chronology violations and the origin of time

We review some results which relate chronology violations to singularities, and explain how the absence of both pathologies implies the existence of a cosmological time. Building on these mathematical ideas we then propose a causality argument in order to solve the homogeneity and entropy problems of cosmology. The solution is based on the replacement of the spacelike Big Bang boundary with a null boundary behind which stays a chronology violating region. This solution requiring a tilting of the light cones near the null boundary is based more on the behavior of the light cones and hence on causality, than on the behavior of the scale factor (expansion). The philosophical connec- tion of this picture with Augustine of Hyppo famous discussion on time and creation is commented.

Causation in Perception: A Challenge to Naïve Realism

Defending a form of naive realism about visual experiences is quite popular these days. Those naive realists who I will be concerned with in this paper make a central claim about the subjective aspects of perceptual experiences. They argue that how it is with the perceiver subjectively when she sees worldly objects is literally determined by those objects. This way of thinking leads them to endorse a form of disjunctivism, according to which the fundamental psychological nature of seeings and hallucinations is distinct. I will oppose their central claim by defending a version of the so-called ‘causal argument’, which dwells on ideas about causation and explanation in perception. The aim of this discussion is to highlight that the subjective aspects of perceptual experiences cannot be explained in naive realist terms. Instead, it will be argued that one needs to appeal to a mental factor which does not involve worldly objects as constituents, and which is common to seeings and hallucinations.

The effects of primed causal uncertainty and causal importance on persuasion

We examined the effects of temporarily accessible causal uncertainty and causal importance on persuasion. Participants completed a scrambled sentence priming task, read strong or weak, causal or noncausal arguments, and then reported their attitudes. We found that participants primed with high levels of causal uncertainty and importance thought carefully about the causal arguments. They were more persuaded by the strong compared to weak causal arguments, and this effect was partially mediated by the favorability of their message-relevant thoughts. Participants primed with high causal uncertainty and low causal importance were more persuaded by strong compared to weak noncausal arguments, but this effect was not mediated by thoughts. We discuss the implications of these findings for the causal uncertainty and persuasion literatures.

‘Pass the Cocoamone, Please’: Causal Impotence, Opportunistic Vegetarianism and Act-Utilitarianism

It appears that utilitarian arguments in favor of moral vegetarianism cannot justify a complete prohibition of eating meat. This is because, in certain circumstances, forgoing meat will prevent no pain, and so, on utilitarian grounds, we should be opportunistic carnivores rather than moral vegetarians. In his paper, ‘Puppies, pigs, and people: Eating meat and marginal cases,’ Alastair Norcross argues that causal impotence arguments like these are misguided. First, he presents an analogous situation, the case of chocolate mousse a-la-bama, in order to argue that we, individually, are not causally impotent. Second, Norcross offers a threshold argument in which he argues that while we may individually be causally impotent, when we adopt moral vegetarianism in concert with others, we become causally potent in preventing harms by factory farming. We argue that Norcross's responses ultimately fail to address the causal impotence objection. The former argument fails because it vastly oversimplifies the world in which we find ourselves. Given the size of factory farming, the reasonable conclusion is that we are in fact powerless to prevent harms to animals in factory farms in many or most cases. The latter argument fails because even if collective action will have an impact on factory farming, this does not provide us with an argument against being carnivores in certain circumstances.

On the Development of Risk Preferences: Experimental Evidence

Using a field experiment eliciting the risk preferences of 490 9th and 11th grade students from a variety of school environments, we examine various factors influencing the development of these risk preferences. In addition to factors previously considered by economists (gender, ethnicity, height, and parental education) we also evaluate cognitive (proxied by math literacy) and emotional (proxied by patience and planning ability) development theories. There is substantially stronger support for the variables typically considered by economists; consistent with prior work we find that girls are more risk averse while tall and nonwhites individuals are more risk tolerant. Next, the impact of school characteristics on the development of risk preferences is examined. Two effects emerge: a peer effect and a quality effect. For the peer effect, individuals who are in a school with a higher percentage of students on free or reduced lunches are significantly more risk averse than those with a lower percentage of students from low-income families. For the quality effect, individuals in schools that have smaller class sizes and a higher percentage of educators with advanced degrees have more moderate levels of risk aversion. Further, school characteristics only influence the 11th graders in the sample-lending some support to a causal argument.

Self-referenced temporal phase reconstruction from intensity measurements using causality arguments in linear optical filters

We introduce and numerically demonstrate a simple and general concept for direct reconstruction of the temporal phase profile of an optical signal from temporal intensity measurements at the input and output of an arbitrary linear optical filter. The concept is based on exploiting the linearity and causality properties of any physical filter. Very few restrictions need to be imposed on the optical filter response to ensure an unambiguous phase reconstruction. The filter can be specifically designed to minimize the noise influence on the measurement process.

A Cosmo-Ontological Argument for the Existence of a First Cause - Perhaps God

The paper presents a new version of the "Cosmological Argument" – considered to be an ontological argument, since it exclusively uses ontological concepts and principles. It employs famous results of modern physics, and distinguishes between event-causation and agent-causation. Due to these features, the argument manages to avoid the objection of infinite regress. It remains true, however, that the conclusion of the argument (just like the conclusion of Thomas Aquinas’s causal argument) is too unspecific to be unambiguously considered an argument for the existence of God.

The Consequences of the Internet for Politics

Political scientists are only now beginning to come to terms with the importance of the Internet to politics. The most promising way to study the Internet is to look at the role that causal mechanisms such as the lowering of transaction costs, homophilous sorting, and preference falsification play in intermediating between specific aspects of the Internet and political outcomes. This will allow scholars to disentangle the relevant causal relationships and contribute to important present debates over whether the Internet exacerbates polarization in the United States, and whether social media helped pave the way toward the Arab Spring uprisings of 2011. Over time, ever fewer political scientists are likely to study the Internet as such, as it becomes more and more a part of everyday political life. However, integrating the Internet's effects with present debates over politics, and taking proper advantage of the extraordinary data that it can provide, requires good causal arguments and attention to their underlying mechanisms.

Why film matters to political theory

In this article, I claim that film matters to political theory not because of the stories films recount, but because the medium of film offers political theorists an image of political thinking that emphasizes the stochastic serialization of actions. I thus argue that the stochastic serialization of moving images that films project makes available for democratic theory an experience of resistance and change as a felt discontinuity of succession, rather than as an inversion of hierarchical power. In my treatment of these issues, I rely on Hume's ontology of ‘broken appearances’ and ‘interrupted perceptions’, as well as Stanley Cavell's ontology of film as treated in The World Viewed. I elaborate the following four aspects of the relation between film and political theory: (i) the action-image; (ii) discontinuity and the fact of series; (iii) actors, artificial persons and human somethings; and (iv) political resistance and an aesthetics of politics. The manner in which I proceed is to show the aspectual overlay between film and political thinking. Such a method of exposition suggests a further, methodological site where film matters to political theory: the stochastic serialization of moving images in film provides political theory with a genre for elaborating ideas that is not reducible to the analytics of causal argument.

GYRO-ORBIT SIZE, BRIGHTNESS TEMPERATURE LIMIT, AND IMPLAUSIBILITY OF COHERENT EMISSION BY BUNCHING IN SYNCHROTRON RADIO SOURCES

We show that an upper limit on the maximum brightness temperature for a self-absorbed incoherent synchrotron radio source is obtained from the size of its gyro orbits, which in turn must lie well within the confines of the total source extent. These temperature limits are obtained without recourse to inverse Compton effects or the condition of equipartition of energy between magnetic fields and relativistic particles. For radio variables, the intra-day variability (IDV) implies brightness temperatures $\sim 10^{19}$ K in the co-moving rest frame of the source. This, if interpreted purely due to an incoherent synchrotron emission, would imply gyro radii $>10^{28}$ cm, the size of the universe, while from the causality arguments the inferred maximum size of the source in such a case is $\stackrel{<}{_{\sim}} 10^{15}$ cm. Such high brightness temperatures are sometimes modeled in the literature as some coherent emission process where bunches of non-thermal particles are somehow formed that radiate in phase. We show that, unlike in case of curvature radiation models proposed in pulsars, in the synchrotron radiation mechanism the oppositely charged particles would contribute together to the coherent phenomenon without the need to form separate bunches of the opposite charges. At the same time we show that bunches would disperse over dimensions larger than a wavelength in time shorter than the gyro orbital period ($\stackrel{<}{_{\sim}}0.1$ sec). Therefore a coherent emission by bunches cannot be a plausible explanation of the high brightness temperatures inferred in extragalactic radio sources showing variability over a few hours or longer.

Emerging from the causal drain

For over 20 years, Jaegwon Kim’s Causal Exclusion Argument has stood as the major hurdle for non-reductive physicalism. If successful, Kim’s argument would show that the high-level properties posited by non-reductive physicalists must either be identical with lower-level physical properties, or else must be causally inert. The most prominent objection to the Causal Exclusion Argument—the so-called Overdetermination Objection—points out that there are some notions of causation that are left untouched by the argument. If causation is simply counterfactual dependence, for example, then the Causal Exclusion Argument fails. Thus, much of the existing debate turns on the issue of which account of causation is appropriate. In this paper, however, I take a bolder approach and argue that Kim’s preferred version of the Causal Exclusion Argument fails no matter what account one gives of causation. Any notion of causation that is strong enough to support the premises of the argument is too strong to play the role required in the logic of the argument. I also consider a second version of the Causal Exclusion Argument, and suggest that although it may avoid the problems of the first version, it begs the question against a particular form of non-reductive physicalism, namely emergentism.