Causal Argument Research Articles

Cognitive fusion as a candidate psychological vulnerability factor for psychosis: An experimental study of acute ∆9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) intoxication

ABSTRACT Heavy cannabis use is associated with an increased risk of psychosis. However, the psychological mechanisms involved, and interactions with established risk factors for cannabis-related psychosis, remain unclear. This study examined the role of cognitive fusion, a candidate vulnerability factor for psychosis, during acute THC intoxication, and the interaction with key risk factors – developmental trauma and schizotypy. Twenty general population cannabis-using participants were administered THC or placebo in a within-participants, double-blinded randomised study. Developmental trauma, schizotypy and cognitive fusion were all associated with psychotic experiences during intoxication. Cognitive fusion accounted for increased psychotic experiences in those with developmental trauma and high schizotypy. Cognitive fusion may be a key mechanism by which developmental trauma and schizotypy increase risk of psychosis from cannabis use. This initial study is limited by a small sample and correlational design; a larger scale mediation study is now needed to support a causal argument. The findings have implications for psychological treatments and identifying those at risk of cannabis-related psychosis. Psychological interventions that target cognitive fusion may be more effective than generic approaches. People prone to cognitive fusion, particularly those with a history of developmental trauma and high in schizotypy, may be at higher risk for cannabis-related psychosis.

O disjuntivismo fenomênico como defesa do realismo ingênuo

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The Effect of Offspring Sex on Parents’ Migration Probabilities and Outcomes—A Natural Experiment

Scholars can rarely make causal claims about migration probabilities and outcomes. Leveraging a natural experiment based on the randomness of offspring sex, this paper uses the German SOEP Migration Sample to examine the effect of having a first‐born son or daughter on parents’ likelihood to migrate and integrate. It shows that (non‐Christian) parents of sons are more likely to migrate to Germany, but parents of daughters fare better after migration in terms of language acquisition, feeling at home and overall satisfied with their lives. The first finding is explained through gendered differences in parental investment, risk aversion, and household decision‐making. The second finding is explained through girls’ greater ability to act as brokers between their parents and the host society. For migration scholarship, the study provides a rare causal argument about family migration. For research on offspring sex effects, it provides further evidence of a socialization from child to parent, expands the possibility of offspring sex effects from parental attitudes to behaviors, and cautions against assuming that offspring sex is random in all populations.

Bayesian Networks and Causal Ecumenism

Proponents of various causal exclusion arguments claim that for any given event, there is often a unique level of granularity at which that event is caused. Against these causal exclusion arguments, causal ecumenists argue that the same event or phenomenon can be caused at multiple levels of granularity. This paper argues that the Bayesian network approach to representing the causal structure of target systems is consistent with causal ecumenism. Given the ubiquity of Bayesian networks as a tool for representing causal structure in both philosophy of science and science itself, this result speaks in favor of the ecumenical view, and against rival exclusionary accounts. Gebharter’s (Philos Phenomenol Res 95(2):353–375, 2017) argument that the Bayes nets formalism is consistent with causal exclusion is considered and rebutted.

Argumentation in Nigerian investigative public hearings

Abstract This paper examines defendants’ argumentative discourse in the 2008 Nigerian investigative public hearings on the Federal Capital Territory administration. The data, which consist of nine defendants’ presentations, are analyzed qualitatively, using a combination of the pragma-dialectical and extended pragma-dialectical theories of argumentation. The findings show that the hearing panel initially starts of as the institutional protagonist and defendants as the antagonists, and but later serve as the institutional antagonist and protagonists, respectively. The defendants tend to use analogy and causal argumentation schemes while employing subordinative and complementary coordinative argumentation structures. The defendants also employ different strategic maneuvers at different argumentative stages of the critical discussion. Due to the politico-forensic communicative domain and information-seeking genre of the investigative public hearing discourse, the concluding stage is suspended. Thus, the study shows the influence of communicative activity type on the argumentative activities in a critical discussion.

The rise of the democracy – authoritarianism cleavage and opposition coordination in Turkey (2014–2019)

ABSTRACT This article examines the coordination of opposition parties in Turkey between the 2014 presidential and the 2019 local elections. To explain opposition coordination from secular, Turkish nationalist, pro-Kurdish, and Islamist parties, the article points out a rising democracy-authoritarianism cleavage. As Turkey became one of the most pronounced cases of democratic backsliding worldwide, this political cleavage gradually overshadowed historically rooted social cleavages and incentivized the opposition parties to coordinate in the name of fighting for democracy. The article shows that in seven electoral contests, the opposition parties coordinated in the form of nominating joint candidates, encouraging strategic voting, running a unified campaign, helping presidential candidates collect signatures, promising to support each other in the runoff, pledging to form a transitional government, transferring deputies to be on the ballot, nominating members of the smaller opposition parties under a larger party's list, not competing in certain districts against each other, and establishing an official alliance. Thanks to their extensive menu of coordination, the opposition parties challenged the ruling party's predominance, undermined its parliamentary majorities, and won local elections in key cities. The article's causal argument and findings have implications for opposition coordination in authoritarian regimes.

The anti-science in the culture of group analysis (1)

This is the first of two articles examining the pervasiveness of religious, primitive and magical thinking in the culture of group analysis. I do so through the vehicle of the writings of Patrick de Maré. The article spells out what I believe to be the misunderstandings underlying de Maré’s rejection of causality, evidence and logical argument; calls into question the conventional view of de Maré’s writings as erudite but difficult; and examines the relationship between de Maré’s ideas and the way he takes up the role of large group conductor.

Developmental differences in preschoolers’ definition assessment and production

Children are able to assess the quality of information presented to them, most notably in the domains of causal explanations and arguments. However, children are also presented with another form of verbal information—definitions. Very little empirical work has investigated how children assess and produce definitions. Two experiments explored preschoolers’ comprehension and production of definitions. In Experiment 1, a selective trust paradigm was used to assess 3-year-olds’ (n = 28) and 5-year-olds’ (n = 28) endorsements of informative and uninformative definitions. Participants were provided with two informants: one who always provided a circular definition (e.g., “Silly means when you are silly”) and one who always provided a noncircular definition (e.g., “Silly means when you are goofy”). The 5-year-olds endorsed noncircular definitions over circular definitions for both frequent and infrequent words, but they chose to learn only from informants who provided information about infrequent words. The 3-year-olds, on the other hand, did not systematically endorse either definition type. In Experiment 2, new groups of 3-year-olds (n = 25) and 5-year-olds (n = 24) were asked to provide definitions, and their responses were coded for correctness and circularity. Results demonstrated that 5-year-olds provided more definitions than 3-year-olds. In addition, 5-year-olds provided more noncircular definitions than 3-year-olds for infrequent words but not for frequent words. Together, the results from Experiments 1 and 2 suggest that children’s understanding of definitions emerges during the preschool period. This work presents an important first step in addressing an understudied facet of lexical development.

Mineralogical analysis and occupational records of asbestos, one more example of its value

Navarra has the first and most exhaustive Record of workers exposed to asbestos in Spain. Since 1996, referred by the Prevention Services and transferred to the Servicio Navarro de Salud_Osasunbidea for related pulmonary pathology surveillance upon retirement. There are currently 2,858 workers, 395 women and 2,463 men. Almost no longer occupy positions of risk. For years it has helped to recognize the professional contingency of damages. Paradoxically, in this case, a worker who died of lung cancer with previous interstitial pathology, a negative result of an autopsy, 425ferruginous bodies/gr dry lung tissue was used to deny the professional origin. It is necessary to consider that a positive result confirms past exposure but the negative one should not be evaluated when it was chrysotile, given the low temporal persistence intissues. A reliable work history and, when they exist, the Records must be the main causal argument.

Physicalism without identity

Abstract This paper presents and discusses the most influential attempts to characterize physicalism without postulating relations of identity between the physical and the prima facie non-physical. The first section deals with a possible criticism that these attempts are misguided, since they contradict the physicalist slogan “everything there is physical.” In the second section, I elucidate the different formulations of the physicalist supervenience claim, and argue that none of them consists in an adequate characterization of physicalism. Three reasons are given in favor of this conclusion: their compatibility with forms of dualism (or pluralism); the fact that the supervenience relation is left unexplained; and Kim’s causal exclusion argument, which asserts that merely supervenient entities (i.e., ones that are not in identity relations with strictly physical entities) must be epiphenomenal. The third section presents the general features of another identity-independent attempt to characterize physicalism, namely realization physicalism. According to this view, tokens of prima facie non-physical types are realized by tokens of strictly physical types performing functional roles that specify the nature of the former. The third section also shows how realization physicalism deals with the objections that make physicalist supervenience claims inadequate for characterizing physicalism.

Criticism of D.B Volkov’s Teleofunctional Solution to the Problem of Mental Causation

The articles examines the teleofunctional solution to the problem of mental causation, presented by Dmitry Volkov in his recently published book Free Will. An Illusion or an Opportunity. D.B. Volkov proposes solutions to three big metaphysical problems – mental causation, personal identity, and free will. Solving the first problem, Volkov creatively combines the advantages of Dennett’s teleofunctional model and Vasilyev’s local interactionism. Volkov’s teleofunctional model of mental causation seeks to prove the causal relevance of mental properties as non-local higher order properties. In my view, its substantiation is based on three points: (a) critics of the exclusion problem and Kim’s model of mental causation, (b) “Library of first editions” argument, (c) reduction of the causal trajectories argument (CTA 1) by Vasilyev to the counterpart argument (CTA 2) by Volkov. Each of these points faces objections. Kim’s criticism is based on an implicit confusion of two types of reduction – reduction from supervenience and from multiple realizability. The latter type does not threaten Kim’s ideas, but Volkov uses this very type in his criticism. The “Library of first editions” argument does not achieve its goal due to compositional features and because non-local relational properties are a type of external properties that cannot be causally relevant. The reduction of CTA 1 to CTA 2 is unsuccessful since, in the case of this reduction, important features of CTA 1 are lost – these are local mental properties, due to which the influence of non-local physical factors occurs. My main objection is that the concept of causally relevant non-local properties is incompatible with the very concept of cause. The set of causally relevant properties of cause can only be local.

Culprit or correlate? An application of the Bradford Hill criteria to Vitamin E acetate

Vitamin E acetate (VEA) has come under significant scrutiny due to its association with e-cigarette, or vaping, product use-associated lung injury (EVALI). In 1965, Sir Austin Bradford Hill proposed a set of criteria used to critically assess an association for causality. In this article, we apply the Bradford Hill causation criteria to VEA and the EVALI outbreak to clarify what further areas of study are needed to strengthen the causal argument. Additionally, we highlight the need for systematized approaches to rapidly identify the cause of mass poisoning events of unknown etiology.

An Empirically Grounded Framework That Evaluates Argument Quality in Scientific and Social Contexts

This study was aimed to develop a general argumentation framework for evaluating the quality of causal arguments across scientific and social contexts. We designed a computer-delivered assessment that contains four scenario-based argumentation tasks. Each task asks students to identify relevant evidence from provided data sources and use the evidence to construct an argument that answers a causal question. One task is about a social issue, while the rest three tasks each requires knowledge of a scientific concept (melting/evaporation, photosynthesis, trophic cascade). The assessment was implemented with 349 students from urban middle and high schools. Based on the data and prior research, we developed an empirically grounded argumentation framework that contains four qualitatively different levels: non-causal arguments, causal arguments lacking logical connections, causal arguments with weak reasoning, and causal arguments with strong reasoning. The qualitative results provide evidence of the existence of the argumentation levels. The IRT analysis and the Wright map provide the evidence that the order of and the distinctions among the argumentation levels are meaningful. Together, the qualitative and quantitative results support the viability of the framework.

Causation, electronic configurations and the periodic table

The article examines a recent interventionist account of causation by Ross, in which electronic configurations of atoms are considered to be the cause of chemical behavior. More specifically I respond to the claim that a change in electronic configuration of an atom, such as occurs in the artificial synthesis of elements, causes a change in the behavior of the atom in question. I argue that chemical behavior is governed as much by the nuclear charge of an atom as it is by its electronic structure. It is suggested that an adequate analysis requires attention to the dynamical interactions between nuclear charges and those of electrons, as typically carried out through the application of the Schrodinger equation. It is concluded that electronic configurations can only be said be causal in a weak sense that is somewhat analogous to the causal arguments that are invoked in folk physics.

A Dose Relationship Between Brain Functional Connectivity and Cumulative Head Impact Exposure in Collegiate Water Polo Players.

A growing body of evidence suggests that chronic, sport-related head impact exposure can impair brain functional integration and brain structure and function. Evidence of a robust inverse relationship between the frequency and magnitude of repeated head impacts and disturbed brain network function is needed to strengthen an argument for causality. In pursuing such a relationship, we used cap-worn inertial sensors to measure the frequency and magnitude of head impacts sustained by eighteen intercollegiate water polo athletes monitored over a single season of play. Participants were evaluated before and after the season using computerized cognitive tests of inhibitory control and resting electroencephalography. Greater head impact exposure was associated with increased phase synchrony [r(16) > 0.626, p < 0.03 corrected], global efficiency [r(16) > 0.601, p < 0.04 corrected], and mean clustering coefficient [r(16) > 0.625, p < 0.03 corrected] in the functional networks formed by slow-wave (delta, theta) oscillations. Head impact exposure was not associated with changes in performance on the inhibitory control tasks. However, those with the greatest impact exposure showed an association between changes in resting-state connectivity and a dissociation between performance on the tasks after the season [r(16) = 0.481, p = 0.043] that could also be attributed to increased slow-wave synchrony [F(4, 135) = 113.546, p < 0.001]. Collectively, our results suggest that athletes sustaining the greatest head impact exposure exhibited changes in whole-brain functional connectivity that were associated with altered information processing and inhibitory control.

The confounding problem of the counterfactual in economic explanation*

Economists who have emphasized uncertainty have tended to draw a sharp epistemic distinction between an ascertainable past and an unknowable future. But in one critical respect – in extracting causal relationships – the epistemic distinction is unsustainable. Many types of causal arguments in economics depend on counterfactual reasoning. Counterfactualizing entails the construction of fictions about what would have happened or would happen in the world absent an event that is taken to be causal. But that alternative world is foreclosed the moment the causal event occurs. Complicating matters, there is no dependable method for ascertaining the uniquely true counterfactual. Distinct research methods, and distinct economic paradigms, generate alternative plausible counterfactual accounts. This implies that causal claims in economics, too, are irreducibly fictitious – regardless of whether the subject matter concerns the past, or the future.

Rousseau’s Observations on Inequality and the Causes of Moral Corruption

Rousseau’s passionate attack on inequalities political, social, and economic, his critique of reigning governments in the name of democracy, and his questioning of the authority of science or philosophy in defense of moral virtue shook the century of Enlightenment and the aftershocks are still felt today. We examine a neglected but important writing in which he first brings together his diverse but interrelated preoccupations: the Observations, his lengthiest defense of the Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts. We analyze the argument in the Observations regarding the causes of moral corruption, taking our cue in part from several structural anomalies. These textual anomalies reveal two causal arguments: first, a political argument identifying inequality as the first cause of corruption, and, second, an argument about the corrupting effects of philosophy on religious faith and popular morality related to the first argument through a common concern with pride and inequality.

Strengthening the exclusion argument

As conceived by Kim, the causal exclusion argument targets all forms of nonreductive physicalism equally, but by restricting its focus to functionalist varieties of nonreductivism, I am able to develop a version of the argument that has a number of virtues lacking in the original. First, the revised argument has no need for Kim’s causal exclusion principle, which many find dubious if not simply false. Second, the revised argument can be adapted to either a production-based conception of causation, as Kim himself favors, or to any of a number of dependence-based conceptions, like the ones favored by many of Kim’s critics. And, finally, the revised argument does not have the objectionable consequence that all so-called higher-level properties are epiphenomenal, for it does not generalize in the way that Kim’s original version of the argument arguably does. Nor does it concede much to narrow the scope of the argument in the way proposed. Those who adopt nonreductive theories of mind do so, by and large, on the strength of functionalist arguments for the multiple realizability of mental states. If functionalism entails that mental properties are epiphenomenal, this thus deals a critical, if not quite fatal, blow to nonreductivism.

The initial mass function in the extended ultraviolet disc of M83

ABSTRACT Using Hubble Space Telescope ACS/WFC data we present the photometry and spatial distribution of resolved stellar populations of four fields within the extended ultraviolet disc (XUV disc) of M83. These observations show a clumpy distribution of main-sequence stars and a mostly smooth distribution of red giant branch stars. We constrain the upper end of the initial mass function (IMF) in the outer disc using the detected population of main-sequence stars and an assumed constant star formation rate (SFR) over the last 300 Myr. By comparing the observed main-sequence luminosity function to simulations, we determine the best-fitting IMF to have a power-law slope α = −2.35 ± 0.3 and an upper mass limit $M_{\rm u}=25_{-3}^{+17} \, \mathrm{M}_\odot$. This IMF is consistent with the observed H $\rm \alpha$ emission, which we use to provide additional constraints on the IMF. We explore the influence of deviations from the constant SFR assumption, finding that our IMF conclusions are robust against all but strong recent variations in SFR, but these are excluded by causality arguments. These results, along with our similar studies of other nearby galaxies, indicate that some XUV discs are deficient in high-mass stars compared to a Kroupa IMF. There are over one hundred galaxies within 5 Mpc, many already observed with HST, thus allowing a more comprehensive investigation of the IMF, and how it varies, using the techniques developed here.

Cierre causal de lo físico, neurofisiología y causas mentales

En este artículo abordo críticamente la aseveración de David Papineau según la cual la evidencia fisiológica acumulada es suficiente para adoptar razonablemente el Principio del Cierre Causal de lo Físico y la vía negativa, viz. entender físico como no mental, como solución al dilema de Hempel. Comenzaremos restando fuerza a tal afirmación revisando el trabajo de W. Penfield y J. Eccles, dos importantes neurocientíficos y declarados dualistas. No obstante, luego nos centraremos en el trabajo de B. Libet en el que se demostraría que los movimientos voluntarios están realmente determinados por causas enteramente (neuro)fisiológicas, lo cual constituiría una pieza fundamental de evidencia a favor de Papineau. Nuestro análisis mostrará que no se siguen tales conclusiones. Esto tendrá consecuencias negativas para el Cierre Causal de lo Físico y con ello para el Argumento Causal para el Fisicalismo del cual el mencionado principio es premisa clave.