Causal History Research Articles

The choice is yours: Infants' expectations about an agent's future behavior based on taking and receiving actions.

Our social world is rich with information about other people's choices, which subsequently inform our inferences about their future behavior. For individuals socialized within the American cultural context, which places a high value on autonomy and independence, outcomes that are the result of an agent's own choices may hold more predictive value than similar outcomes that are the result of another person's choices. Across two experiments we test the ontogeny of this phenomenon; that is, whether infants are sensitive to the causal history associated with an agent's acquisition of an object. We demonstrate that on average, 12.5-month-old American infants view taking actions as a better indication of an agent's future behavior than are receiving actions. Furthermore, there were significant individual differences in the extent to which infants perceived object receipt to be indicative of future behavior. Specifically, the less autonomous infants were perceived to be (by their parents), socialized to be, and behaved, the more they viewed object receipt as indicative of future behavior. The results are discussed in terms of the role of individual and cultural experience in early understanding of intentional action. (PsycINFO Database Record

Where There's Smoke … Photography's Causal Histories

The ways in which a particular historical milieu understands the relationship between causes and effects helps us to discern its conception of photography, a representational mode so often entangled in such categories. An examination of the last third of the nineteenth century and its so-called “revolt against positivism” provides an example. This period saw the slow and nearly comprehensive collapse of positivist history, and no grievance was more regularly directed at the declining school than the reductive scientism of its account of causality. Recognizing this crisis compels us to look at photographs of the period in a particular light—as the products of a tension between two fundamentally different epistemologies, or, more specifically, what we might call two different “cultures of causality.” This study commences that project by examining a group of photographs produced in Naples, where the causal legibility of Vesuvius's plumes—as innocent emissions or ominous tocsins—took on an existential import.

Trigger warning: no proximal intentions required for intentional action

In this paper, I argue that some intentional actions are not triggered by proximal intentions; i.e. there are actions which are intentional, but lack relevant proximal intentions in their immediate causal history. More specifically, I first introduce various properties of intentions. I then argue that some actions (such as some spontaneous actions) are triggered by mental states which lack properties typically ascribed to intentions, yet these actions are still intentional. The view that all intentional actions are triggered by proximal intentions is thus false.

Free Will and Open Alternatives

Abstract In her recent book Causation and Free Will, Carolina Sartorio develops a distinctive version of an actual-sequence account of free will, according to which, when agents choose and act freely, their freedom is exclusively grounded in, and supervenes on, the actual causal history of such choices or actions. Against this proposal, I argue for an alternative- possibilities account, according to which agents’ freedom is partly grounded in their ability to choose or act otherwise. Actual-sequence accounts of freedom (and moral responsibility) are motivated by a reflection on so-called Frankfurt cases. Instead, other cases, such as two pairs of examples originally designed by van Inwagen, threaten actual-sequence accounts, including Sartorio’s. On the basis of her (rather complex) view of causation, Sartorio contends, however, that the two members of each pair have different causal histories, so that her view is not undermined by those cases after all. I discuss these test cases further and defend my alternative-possibilities account of freedom.

Causation, complexity, and the Concert: the pragmatics of causal explanation in International Relations

A causal explanation provides information about the causal history of whatever is being explained. However, most causal histories extend back almost infinitely and can be described in almost infinite detail. Causal explanations therefore involve choices about which elements of causal histories to pick out. These choices are pragmatic: they reflect our explanatory interests. When adjudicating between competing causal explanations, we must therefore consider not only questions of epistemic adequacy (whether or not we have good grounds for identifying certain factors as causes), but also questions of pragmatic adequacy (whether or not the aspects of the causal history picked out are salient to our explanatory interests). Recognising that causal explanations differ pragmatically as well as epistemically is crucial for identifying what is at stake in competing explanations of the relative peacefulness of the nineteenth-century Concert system. It is also crucial for understanding how explanations of past events can inform policy prescription.

The exquisitely painful fingertip – subungual glomus tumours

While most painful fingertips have a distinct causal history and/or associated symptoms, some can leave the practitioner at a loss during diagnosis. We present a rare differential that often has an indistinct history, subtle clinical signs and is commonly misdiagnosed, with average diagnosis time reported as 7 years 1. A 25-year-old patient presented with a several-year history of a gradually increasingly painful fingertip, just beneath her nail plate. There was no history of trauma or precipitating event she could recollect. She had been assessed by several practitioners over the years with normal radiology and ineffective neuromodulation, and analgesics offered little effect. On examination, she had a minimal area of slight blue discolouration under her nail plate, which elicited exquisite pain on palpation. This was diagnosed clinically as a subungual glomus tumour based on the symptom of exquisite pain in the fingertip without causal history and the subtle colour discolouration. Treatment was surgical excision under a digital nerve block with removal of the overlying nail plate. The lesion was characterised as a spot directly beneath the nail plate (Figure 1A), with a leash of proximal feeding vessels (Figure 1B). Excision was performed and the resulting defect closed directly (Figure 1C). Histology subsequently confirmed the clinical diagnosis of a glomus tumour, and on postoperative review, she was pain free. Glomus tumours were first described by Wood in 1812, with subsequent histological characterisation by Masson in 1924 2, 3. They are rare, typically benign tumours that arise from the neuromyoarterial structure of the glomus body, a structure believed to serve a thermoregulatory purpose 4. They account for 1–4·5% of hand tumours and are more common in women 1, 5. Although within the hand, the most common site being subungual, glomus tumours may also be found under the nail fold, nail matrix and within the pulp. They characteristically present with a triad of a tender, single, identifiable spot, which is hypersensitive to the cold and causes extreme pain 2. Two clinical tests, with high specificity, are commonly used to aid diagnosis: Love and Heldrith's tests. “Love's test” describes using a small rounded tip, such as a ball point pen nib, to press against the lesion eliciting exquisite pain. “Heldrith's test” involves raising the arm above heart level to exsanguinate the limb prior to inflation of a blood pressure cuff over the upper arm. The patient may experience symptomatic relief during this phase. The pressure cuff is then released, and pain is instantly elicited in the fingertip with a positive test 1, 6. Magnetic resonance imaging and ultrasound scanning have been shown to play a role in delineating the extent and location of the tumour, although this is not clinically indicated 7. In summary, when presented with a patient who has an extremely painful fingertip and an unclear history, never forget the rare but debilitating glomus tumour and refer the patient on to a hand surgeon for further management.

A Causal Theory of Mnemonic Confabulation.

This paper attempts to answer the question of what defines mnemonic confabulation vis-à-vis genuine memory. The two extant accounts of mnemonic confabulation as “false memory” and as ill-grounded memory are shown to be problematic, for they cannot account for the possibility of veridical confabulation, ill-grounded memory, and well-grounded confabulation. This paper argues that the defining characteristic of mnemonic confabulation is that it lacks the appropriate causal history. In the confabulation case, there is no proper counterfactual dependence of the state of seeming to remember on the corresponding past representation.

Explaining rural land use change and reforestation: A causal-historical approach

Research on human-environment interactions is bedeviled by two key analytical challenges: integrating natural and social science information and demonstrating causal connections between proximate and distant influences. These challenges can be met by adopting an event-focused, causal-historical approach to research methodology, referred to here as Abductive Causal Eventism (ACE). With ACE, researchers construct causal histories of interrelated social and/or biophysical events backward in time and outward or inward in space through a process of eliminative inference and reasoning from effects to causes, called abduction. ACE is contrasted with three leading approaches to human-environment research: Land Change Science (LCS), Socio-ecological Systems (SES), and Political Ecology (PE). For illustration, ACE is applied to a study of post-War environmental change in two rural watersheds in Saint Lucia, West Indies. Findings reveal that the most consequential change has been the widespread reforestation of lands abandoned from farming. This change occurred irrespective of the type of land tenure, but was especially commonplace on lands with steeper slopes and further from roads. Reforestation during the 1960s and 1970s was caused by a combination of commodity market challenges, abandonment of subsistence cultivation in response to smaller family sizes, and sizable out-migrations of younger adults overseas. The expansion of banana cultivation in the 1960s and then again in the 1980s slowed and in places reversed this trend. But an especially large wave of farmland abandonment swept the island from the mid-1990s to early-2000s because the banana export market collapsed as a result of preferential market access being eroded by a series of WTO trade rulings. These effects have been reinforced by a surge in investment from return migrants and the tourism industry which has drawn labour out of farming while also creating economic incentive and political support for protecting more forests on both private estates and public lands. Yet, the post-War trend in reforestation may have ended as agriculture displays signs of rebounding and residential and tourism development expands unabated into the countryside. This study demonstrates the advantages of using ACE where explanations entail diverse types of causes operating across space and over time.

Entropic Phase Maps in Discrete Quantum Gravity

Path summation offers a flexible general approach to quantum theory, including quantum gravity. In the latter setting, summation is performed over a space of evolutionary pathways in a history configuration space. Discrete causal histories called acyclic directed sets offer certain advantages over similar models appearing in the literature, such as causal sets. Path summation defined in terms of these histories enables derivation of discrete Schrödinger-type equations describing quantum spacetime dynamics for any suitable choice of algebraic quantities associated with each evolutionary pathway. These quantities, called phases, collectively define a phase map from the space of evolutionary pathways to a target object, such as the unit circle S 1 ⊂ C , or an analogue such as S 3 or S 7 . This paper explores the problem of identifying suitable phase maps for discrete quantum gravity, focusing on a class of S 1 -valued maps defined in terms of “structural increments” of histories, called terminal states. Invariants such as state automorphism groups determine multiplicities of states, and induce families of natural entropy functions. A phase map defined in terms of such a function is called an entropic phase map. The associated dynamical law may be viewed as an abstract combination of Schrödinger’s equation and the second law of thermodynamics.

Crosscutting psycho-neural taxonomies: the case of episodic memory

I will begin by proposing a taxonomy of taxonomic positions regarding the mind–brain: localism, globalism, revisionism, and contextualism, and will go on to focus on the last position. Although some versions of contextualism have been defended by various researchers, they largely limit themselves to a version of neural contextualism: different brain regions perform different functions in different neural contexts. I will defend what I call “environmental-etiological contextualism,” according to which the psychological functions carried out by various neural regions can only be identified and individuated against an environmental context or with reference to a causal history. While this idea may seem innocuous enough, it has important implications for a structure-to-function mapping in the mind and brain sciences. It entails that the same neural structures can subserve different psychological functions in different contexts, leading to crosscutting psycho-neural mappings. I will try to illustrate how this can occur with reference to recent research on episodic memory.

Visual perception of shape altered by inferred causal history.

One of the main functions of vision is to represent object shape. Most theories of shape perception focus exclusively on geometrical computations (e.g., curvatures, symmetries, axis structure). Here, however, we find that shape representations are also profoundly influenced by an object’s causal origins: the processes in its past that formed it. Observers placed dots on objects to report their perceived symmetry axes. When objects appeared ‘complete’—created entirely by a single generative process—responses closely approximated the object’s geometrical axes. However, when objects appeared ‘bitten’—as if parts had been removed by a distinct causal process—the responses deviated significantly from the geometrical axes, as if the bitten regions were suppressed from the computation of symmetry. This suppression of bitten regions was also found when observers were not asked about symmetry axes but about the perceived front and back of objects. The findings suggest that visual shape representations are more sophisticated than previously appreciated. Objects are not only parsed according to what features they have, but also to how or why they have those features.

Petri games: Synthesis of distributed systems with causal memory

We present a new multiplayer game model for the interaction and the flow of information in a distributed system. The players are tokens on a Petri net. As long as the players move in independent parts of the net, they do not know of each other; when they synchronize at a joint transition, each player gets informed of the causal history of the other player. We show that for Petri games with a single environment player and an arbitrary bounded number of system players, deciding the existence of a safety strategy for the system players is EXPTIME-complete.

Domestic demand for Indigenous tourism in Australia: understanding intention to participate

ABSTRACTIn Australia, low domestic visitor participation rates in Indigenous tourism have negative effects on its sustainable development. This lax demand remains under-examined in published research. This study uses an attribution-based theory, the folk-conceptual theory of behaviour explanation, to investigate how domestic visitors describe their intentional behaviour to participate, or not, in two Indigenous tourism activities (rock-art sites and a cultural centre) situated within Victoria's Grampians National Park. Studies in tourism research using attribution theory remain limited; this appears to be the first using folk-conceptual theory. It adopts a qualitative approach using semi-structured interviews and the photo-elicitation method with 50 domestic visitors. Results indicate that visitors are more inclined to link “beliefs” than “desires” regarding their intention to participate in nature-based Indigenous tourism activities with connections with history, culture, and learning. However, despite Indigenous tourism being linked to a nature-based environment in the study area, “valuings”, “enabling factors”, and “causal history of reasons” affect participation levels. While these findings relate to previous research on motivations and barriers, participants’ explanatory choices enable deeper insights into visitors’ judgements that could then inform strategies to facilitate long-term sustainable Indigenous tourism growth. Understanding demand is central to Indigenous communities attaining benefits from sustainable tourism.

The Perception of History

The perception of shape, it has been argued, also often entails the perception of time. A cookie missing a bite, for example, is seen as a whole cookie that was subsequently bitten. It has never been clear, however, whether such observations truly reflect visual processing. To explore this possibility, we tested whether the perception of history in static shapes could actually induce illusory motion perception. Observers watched a square change to a truncated form, with a “piece” of it missing, and they reported whether this change was sudden or gradual. When the contours of the missing piece suggested a type of historical “intrusion” (as when one pokes a finger into a lump of clay), observers actually saw that intrusion occur: The change appeared to be gradual even when it was actually sudden, in a type of transformational apparent motion. This provides striking phenomenological evidence that vision involves reconstructing causal history from static shapes.

Representing the past: memory traces and the causal theory of memory

According to the Causal Theory of Memory (CTM), remembering a particular past event requires a causal connection between that event and its subsequent representation in memory, specifically, a connection sustained by a memory trace. The CTM is the default view of memory in contemporary philosophy, but debates persist over what the involved memory traces must be like. Martin and Deutscher (Philos Rev 75:161–196, 1966) argued that the CTM required memory traces to be structural analogues of past events. Bernecker (Memory: A philosophical study. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2010) and Michaelian (Philos Psychol 24:323–342, 2011), contemporary CTM proponents, reject structural analogues in favor of memory traces as distributed patterns of event features. The proposals are understood as distinct accounts of how memory traces represent past events. But there are two distinct questions one could ask about a trace’s representational features. One might ask how memory traces, qua mental representations, have their semantic properties. Or, what makes memory traces, qua mental representations of memories, distinct from other mental representations. Proponents of the CTM, both past and present, have failed to keep these two questions distinct. The result is a serious but unnoticed problem for the CTM in its current form. Distributed memory traces are incompatible with the CTM. Such traces do not provide a way to track the causal history of individual memories, as the CTM requires. If memory traces are distributed patterns of event features, as Bernecker and Michaelian each claim, then the CTM cannot be right.

Causal and Acausal Sets Based on a Quotient Lattice

Causal and Acausal Sets Based on a Quotient Lattice The spacetime viewed from the inside by using a lattice is here described as a causal set, and a quotient lattice is described as a causal history. It is shown that this description is consistent with general relativity and quantum theory. In particular, the influence of measurement on a causal set is considered and the interaction between a causal set and history is defined. The transitions from a causal set to a causal history and vice versa are both defined in a category theory and they are shown to be an adjunction. This adjunction leads to the idea of a relative casual set, and it results in the evolution and superposition of causal sets and histories. It is shown that the superposed casual set is a bicontinuous poset equipped with a compact interval. Relative causal sets are also equipped with the operation of self-embedding. A causal set is continually transformed into a degenerate distributive lattice due to the self-embedding. When an acausal set in a causal set can be transformed into a tensor product of underlying Hilbert spaces, the distributive lattice reveals a unitary evolution of composite states that is consistent with quantum theory.

Bent out of shape: The visual inference of non-rigid shape transformations applied to objects

In everyday life, we can often identify when an object has been subjected to some kind of transformation that alters its shape. For example, we can usually tell whether a can has been crushed, or a cookie has been bitten. Conversely, our ability to recognize objects is often robust across such shape transformations: we can still identify the can even though it has been dented. This ability to determine and discount the causal history of objects suggests the visual system may partially decompose the observed shape of an object into original (untransformed) elements plus the transformations that were applied to it. We sought to shed light on this possibility, using ‘bending’ as an example transformation. In one experiment subjects matched the degree of bending applied to random 3D shapes. We find that subjects could match the degree of bend, although there was a tendency to overestimate bends, especially for the least bent objects. In two other experiments, observers had to identify individual objects across different degrees of bending. Subjects performed significantly above chance although not as well as when the objects differed by rigid rotations without any bends (cf. traditional mental rotation experiments). Together our findings suggest that subjects can to some extent extract information about transformations applied to shapes, while ignoring other differences. At the same time subjects show a certain degree of invariance across shape transformations. This suggests scission of a shape’s representation into its causes – a base shape and transformations applied to it.

The perception of history: Seeing causal history in static shapes is powerful enough to induce illusory motion perception

The perception of history: Seeing causal history in static shapes is powerful enough to induce illusory motion perception

Perception of shape and space across rigid transformations

Objects in our environment are subject to manifold transformations, either of the physical objects themselves or of the object images on the retina. Despite drastic effects on the objects’ physical appearances, we are often able to identify stable objects across transformations and have strong subjective impressions of the transformations themselves. This suggests the brain is equipped with sophisticated mechanisms for inferring both object constancy, and objects’ causal history. We employed a dot-matching task to study in geometrical detail the effects of rigid transformations on representations of shape and space. We presented an untransformed ‘base shape’ on the left side of the screen and its transformed counterpart on the right (rotated, scaled, or both). On each trial, a dot was superimposed at a given location on the contour (Experiment 1) or within and around the shape (Experiment 2). The participant’s task was to place a dot at the corresponding location on the right side of the screen. By analyzing correspondence between responses and physical transformations, we tested for object constancy, causal history, and transformation of space. We find that shape representations are remarkably robust against rotation and scaling. Performance is modulated by the type and amount of transformation, as well as by contour saliency. We also find that the representation of space within and around a shape is transformed in line with the shape transformation, as if shape features establish an object-centered reference frame. These findings suggest robust mechanisms for the inference of shape, space and correspondence across transformations.

Tambora: The Eruption that Changed the World by Gillen D’Arcy Wood

Gillen D'Arcy Wood. Tambora: The Eruption that Changed World. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014. Pp. 293. $29.95. Gillen D'Arcy Wood's new book, which maps out a chain of apparently unrelated disasters triggered by explosion of Mount Tambora in 1815, arrives as a timely intervention for a humanities obsessed with subspecialty buzzwords like empire and ecology, even as it serves as a validation of urgent pleas by forward-looking activists--some might say realists--that time is running out. It is truly not for nothing then that D'Arcy Wood describes Tambora as a cautionary tale that foretells our own fate (11). What he claims in his chapter on Tambora-induced early-American crop failure serves as a frightening leitmotif of whole book and of our precarious contemporary condition: the old weather legends revive again to haunt us, this time as premonitory images of our own emerging climate dystopia (200). We might well say that D'Arcy Wood's book puts into historicized climate-change context both Faulkner's remark that past isn't dead, it isn't even past, and Joyce's that history is a nightmare from which we are trying to awaken. As D'Arcy Wood shows in grim detail, Year without a Summer of 1816 that resulted from Tambora, in addition to being a time of devastating famines, epidemics, and death, was also year that Mary Shelley conceived of and began Frankenstein. Born in a chateau at feet of Swiss Alps from 18 June 1816 ghost-writing contest between rain-rebuffed Mary Shelley, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, and John Polidori, Frankenstein remains a cautionary tale about humanity's scientific and technological ambitions doubling back and threatening their continued species' existence. As D'Arcy Wood is quick to recount, this contest among sheltered friends and literary rivals (they weren't quite, as we say now with that wonderfully Frankensteinian word-merger, frenemies) resulted in two defining monsters of modernity: creature from Frankenstein and, more waywardly, Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897), which emerged from dim influence of Polidori's fragmentary Vampyre, itself adapted from Byron's own fragmentary ghost tale (51-53). But D'Arcy Wood's is not simply another account of these well-known literary and cultural touchstones; instead, his is first study to link them to weather-related causal history, specifically, Tambora's eruption and its resulting strange and stormy stratospheric disruptions. In lucid and compelling prose, D'Arcy Wood illuminates how Romanticism's most globally visible creation on page, stage, screen, and Halloween trappings--Shelley's creature--is intimately tied (and one can think here of icy, treacherous accumulations of Blanc that appear in so many late Romantic texts) to what we now call, variously, global warming, climate change, or, in more no-nonsense phrase, global climate disaster. As tantalizing as this may sound for Romanticists and literary historians, it is not D'Arcy Wood's intention to explore implications of Tambora for, and in work of, Shelleys and Byron despite occasionally brief-and for this reader, often glancing and cursory--readings that pop up (Darkness, 66-69; The Last Man, 95-96; Mont Blanc, Frankenstein, 151-57). Rather, Shelleys and Byron serve as our occasional tour guides through suffering worldscape of 1815-1818 (9). Although book's fleeting glimpses of such important figures, and his breezy reading of their works, will prove frustrating for some, D'Arcy Wood nevertheless does open pathways for future Romantic-era studies by providing a transatlantic and transpacific scientific and historical context for Shelley circle in particular and late Romanticism in general. So while D'Arcy Wood demonstrates Tambora's importance for some key Romantic texts--like aforementioned Frankenstein--his main aim is both more globally-ranging and broadly popular (as low price tag suggests, D'Arcy Wood and Princeton University Press are targeting a much more inclusive market than typical academic one). …