Concept Of Causality Research Articles

К вопросу о причинной связи в делах о преступлениях в здравоохранении

The subject of this study is the issues of legal assessment of the provision of medical care and medical services with non-compliance with the legislation in the field of healthcare. On the basis of a study of a significant amount of law enforcement practice, emphasis was placed on the legal meaning and content of the concept of causation, as well as the meaning and role of an expert opinion in cases of offenses of medical workers committed in the process of providing medical care and medical services. The article draws conclusions about the expediency of correcting law enforcement practice, taking into account the position of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation, clarifying the content of the causal relationship in the legal assessment of the provision of medical care and medical services that do not meet safety requirements.

Integration and Causality in Enactive Approaches to Psychiatry.

In this paper I address what has been called the integration problem in psychiatry. This problem is tied to conceptions of causality and explanatory levels in our understanding of mind. I take an interdisciplinary enactive perspective to develop a 3-fold method for exploring the dynamics of integration, based on a concept of dynamical causation and a non-hierarchical (level-free) notion of gestalt. I also consider Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) as a test case.

Religion in the Twenty-First Century

Religion in the Twenty-First Century

Understanding as explaining: how motives can become causes

The distinction of „understanding“ and „explaining“, formulated by Karl Jaspers in his „General Psychopathology“, has had a lasting effect on psychiatry. As a result, phenomenological, hermeneutic, or psychodynamic approaches have often been accorded only descriptive or epiphenomenal status, while the actual causes of mental illness have been sought in neurobiologically or genetically based explanations. In contrast, this paper defends the explanatory role of understanding and phenomenological approaches. To this end, two levels of explanation are distinguished and shown to be equally justified in principle, namely, motivational explanation at the macro-level and physical explanation at the micro-level. The actual causal role of motivational, i.e., understandable connections is then demonstrated by means of a conception of circular causality, which includes downward causality. Finally, the explanatory role of phenomenological analyses is also shown in psychotic disorders that refuse motivational understanding, using the example of schizophrenic delusion.

The doctrine of consideration in english contract law and related legal constructions in the law of countries of the romano-german legal family

Introduction. The article is devoted to the doctrine of consideration in Anglo-American law and similar legal constructions in the law of the countries of the Romano-Germanic legal family. On the basis of foreign studies of the doctrine of consideration, the author finds out the legal nature of this doctrine in contract law. Attention is focused on the fact that consideration is associated with the categories of interest, good, benefit, benefit, loss. It is indicated that consideration is an essential condition for the validity of any contract, including an informal one. An attempt is made to compare the doctrine of consideration with the concept of cause of transaction in the RomanoGermanic legal family, which was developed due to the reception of Roman law. Summary of the main research results. Reasonable causes as promises to carry out an exchange of certain goods brings this concept closer to the doctrine of consideration. However, the ambiguity of the term “causa” in the sources of Roman law (motive, purpose, result, basis) makes it impossible to find the origins of the doctrine of consideration in the Roman concepts of causa, as indicated in the article. The modern understanding of the cause of action as the goal that the parties seek to achieve when entering into a contract is also different from the doctrine of consideration. The author emphasizes that the Civil Code of Ukraine contains neither the doctrine of consideration nor the concept of cause. On the other hand, in the civil law of Ukraine, the category of counter is manifested in the concepts: "counter performance", "counter obligations", "counter claims". It is emphasized that Article 538 of the Civil Code of Ukraine "Reciprocal performance of an obligation" also cannot be considered an analogue of the doctrine of counter-provision, since the right to refuse to perform a counter-obligation established in this article is applied precisely at the stage of performance of the contract to obligations that are interdependent Conclusions. The author made a conclusion about the possibility and usefulness of the reception of the counterproviding doctrine and its application in national judicial practice.

Study of Visual Garbage as Visual Ecology Perspective

The following article explores the notion of visual garbage and considers various strategies for its recycling, upcycling, and use. Visual garbage is investigated in the context of media sphere development and the theory of garbage itself. The authors propose to analyse such approaches of visual garbage use, as visual camouflage and glitch art, as well as to examine the principles of visual garbage recycling in terms of the Aristotelian conception of causality. Understanding garbage as a medium helps not only to uncover the features of its circulation, but also to consider garbage as a source of knowledge accumulation. Moreover, it helps to find new social, political and aesthetic strategies for understanding contemporaneity, which in turn allows us to draw conclusions about the untapped potential of visual garbage. Visual garbage not only becomes a source of visual pollution, but also contains a resource for reality conversion. In order to determine the criteria for visual pollution, it is necessary to examine the performative productivity of garbage and its effect as a mediating tool.

Testing for time-varying Granger causality

The concept of Granger causality is an important tool in applied macroeconomics. Recently, recursive econometric methods have been developed to analyze the temporal stability of Granger-causal relationships. This article offers an implementation of these recursive procedures in Stata. An empirical example illustrates their use in analyzing the temporal stability of Granger causality among key U.S. macroeconomic series.

Tracing Karma in Meiji Japan

Abstract Despite its doctrinal importance, the concept of karma or karmic causality has come to occupy a complicated place in contemporary Japanese Buddhism, due to its historical connection with discrimination against outcast groups and disabled people. Furthermore, among post-war Japanese intellectuals, the idea of karma has often invoked criticism in the context of modern values such as free will and human potential. Against this conventional framework, this paper demonstrates how the concept of karma was the focus of intense interest among Meiji Japanese intellectuals and a center concern in the developing global network of modern Buddhists. At the intersection of the multifaceted problems facing the Buddhist world at that time—namely, the Buddhist search for scientific religion, civil morality in the nation-building process, reformulating Buddhism for non-Japanese audiences, and the confrontation with competing forms of Western thought—lies the relatively unexamined story of karma in Meiji Japan (1868–1912).

Variable relativity of causation is good

Interventionism is a theory of causation with a pragmatic goal: to define causal concepts that are useful for reasoning about how things could, in principle, be purposely manipulated. In its original presentation, Woodward’s (2003) interventionist definition of causation is relativized to an analyzed variable set. In Woodward (2008), Woodward changes the definition of the most general interventionist notion of cause, contributing cause, so that it is no longer relativized to a variable set. This derelativization of interventionism has not gathered much attention, presumably because it is seen as an unproblematic way to save the intuition that causal relations are objective features of the world. This paper first argues that this move has problematic consequences. Derelativization entails two concepts of unmediated causal relation that are not coextensional, but which nonetheless do not entail different conclusions about manipulability relations within any given variable set. This is in conflict with the pragmatic orientation at the core of interventionism. The paper then considers various approaches for resolving this tension but finds them all wanting. It is concluded that interventionist causation should not be derelativized in the first place. Various considerations are offered rendering that conclusion acceptable.

A Nonlinear Effective Connectivity Measure Based on Granger Causality and Volterra Series

Estimating effective connectivity, especially in brain networks, is an important topic to find out the brain functions. Various effective connectivity measures are presented, but they have drawbacks, including bivariate structure, the problem in detecting nonlinear interactions, and high computational cost. In this paper, we have proposed a novel multivariate effective connectivity measure based on a hierarchical realization of the Volterra series model and Granger causality concept, namely hierarchical Volterra Granger causality (HVGC). HVGC is a multivariate connectivity measure that can detect linear and nonlinear causal effects. The performance of HVGC is compared with Granger causality index (GCI), conditional Granger causality index (CGCI), transfer entropy (TE), phase transfer entropy (Phase TE), and partial transfer entropy (Partial TE) in simulated and physiological datasets. In addition to accuracy, specificity, and sensitivity, the Matthews correlation coefficient (MCC) is used to evaluate the connectivity estimation in simulated datasets. Furthermore influence of different SNRs is investigated on the estimated connectivity. The obtained results show that HVGC with a minimum MCC of 0.76 performs well in the detection of both linear and nonlinear interactions in simulated data. HVGC is also applied to a physiological dataset that was cardiorespiratory interaction signals recorded during sleep from a patient suffering from sleep apnea. The results of this dataset also demonstrate the capability of the proposed method in the detection of causal interactions. Applying HVGC on the simulated fMRI dataset led to a high MCC of 0.78. Moreover, the results indicate that HVGC has slight changes in different SNRs. The results indicate that HVGC can estimate the causal effects of a linear and nonlinear system with a low computational cost and it is slightly affected by noise.

The fate of causal structure under time reversal

What happens to the causal structure of a world when time is reversed? At first glance it seems there are two possible answers: the causal relations are reversed, or they are not. I argue that neither of these answers is correct: we should either deny that time-reversed worlds have causal relations at all, or deny that causal concepts developed in the actual world are reliable guides to the causal structure of time-reversed worlds. The first option is motivated by the instability of time-reversed dynamical evolutions under interventions. The second option is motivated by a recognition of how contingent structural features of the actual world shape our causal concepts and reasoning strategies.

A Promise of Happiness? Nietzsche on Beauty

Abstract Nietzsche presents a challenging conception of aesthetics. One of the most well-known discussions on this issue is presented by Heidegger in Der Wille zur Macht als Kunst (1936/37). In discussing Nietzsche’s aesthetic theory, Heidegger argues that Nietzsche’s reception of Kantian aesthetics is only ever indirect and necessarily mediated by Schopenhauer. His conclusion hinges on what he considers to be a widespread misinterpretation of Kant’s theory of the beautiful, a misinterpretation that begins with Schopenhauer but characterizes all of Kant’s followers, especially Nietzsche. In this paper, I will consider Nietzsche’s position toward aesthetics from a different perspective, namely in the space between Kant’s and Schopenhauer’s position. The argumentation departs from Nietzsche’s early critique of teleology; his first approaches to aesthetics in Die Geburt der Tragödie (1872); and his position on the concept of causality and morality. As a careful interpretation of GM III 6 will make clear, Heidegger’s claim that Nietzsche misinterprets Kant is made questionable by the fact that Nietzsche here distinguishes Kant (especially his emphasis on universalism and impersonality as central features of aesthetic judgments) from Schopenhauer’s approach and proposes an artist-based aesthetics in which it is rather Stendhal’s idea of beauty as “une promesse de bonheur” which expresses the human need for illusions in Nietzsche’s conception of aesthetics.

Perception as controlled hallucination

Abstract“Perception is controlled hallucination,” according to proponents of predictive processing accounts of vision. I say they are right that something like this is a consequence of their view but wrong in how they have pursued the idea. The focus of my counterproposal is the causal theory of perception, which I develop in terms of a productive concept of causation. Cases of what otherwise seem like successful perception are instead mere veridical hallucination if predictive processing accounts are correct, I argue, because of the role played within such accounts by absences, which cannot enter into productive causal relations. I offer two arguments in support of the productive theory of perception. The first is loosely Kantian, focusing on the role that receptivity and spontaneity play in perception. The second focuses on what perception and hallucination have in common. I conclude with a series of objections and replies.

Examining interconnectedness between media attention and cryptocurrency markets: A transfer entropy story

This note aims at using transfer entropy as a broader concept of causality than Granger’s approach to measure the direction and the intensity of spillovers between five major cryptocurrencies. For this purpose, we use two channels of transmission: price movements and Google-based investor attention. Our results shed light on the dominance of only a few cryptocurrencies, in their influences on price movements as well as on media attention in the other cryptocurrencies.

Causation as an Element of the Composition of the Offence in Private-Legal Relations

In this article the author analyzes causation with the emphasis on tort relations. Nevertheless, causation is a fundamental concept that is applicable to all areas of law, especially causation in tort relations in Ukraine is the least examined issue.The basic conceptions of causation were overlooked, in particular the “but for” test and “conditio sine gua non” which establish that causation exists only in the case act or omission is a necessary antecedent for the concrete consequences. To fulfill the requirement of causation existence between the act or omission and the consequence, such causation should be direct. However, whether the causation is direct or not in tort cases is often left to judicial activism. So the main objective of this article is to specify certain instruments which can be used to establish the existence of causation. Moreover, there are certain burdensome obstacles that complicate this objective, such as when the consequences of the unlawful act or omission are unpredictable, when causation is interrupted by the act or omission of a third independent decision-maker or when there are multiple causes, which could lead to a particular consequence. Thereby, to reach that goal many approaches used in various jurisdictions were analyzed. Firstly, the predictability principle in the contract law settled in Hadley v. Baxendale and analogues of this principle in tort law were examined. Secondly, the dependence of the presence of a causation on the nature of consequence was analyzed with the reference to the case Jolley v. Sutton LBC. Thirdly, the difficulty of establishing causation in cases when causation is interrupted by the act or omission of independent decision-maker was managed to be addressed by means of analyzing the case of European Court of Justice Kone AG and Others v. ÖBB-Infrastruktur AG. Fourthly, “materially contributing cause”, developed in Athey v. Leonati was studied in context of multiple causation. To establish the existence of causation, the factor of predictability can be used, i.e. in the current situation, the reasonable bystander, who would be in the same circumstances as the offender, would have to anticipate the occurrence of the corresponding consequences. That is why, the consequences should not be “specific” or unpredictable.In case of multiple causes, the approaches to address the issue of causation differ significantly. For example, in the Anglo-Saxon legal family in case of multiple causes, it is sufficient to prove that one of them had greater impact on the occurrence of negative consequences than the others. Whereas in the practice of national courts, it is necessary to prove that one cause directly and indirectly affected the occurrence of a negative consequence and that in the case of multiple causes of a causal link, there is no causation.Thus, in cases where it is difficult to establish a causal link, it is necessary to use the principles developed by both the national practice and the practice of other jurisdictions. Neglecting such principles in establishing causation can lead to a violation of legal certainty and the rule of law in general.

Extended qualitative content analysis: researching the United Nations and other international institutions

PurposeThis paper aims to introduce the extended qualitative content analysis (EQCA) method to integrate data-reducing and data-complicating research steps when conducting qualitative research on the United Nations and other international institutions.Design/methodology/approachEQCA supplements the method of qualitative content analysis, which enables researchers to deal with large amounts of data, with two elements from grounded theory, which allow detailed analysis and interpretation of codes and sub-codes. The elements in question are axial coding and theoretical sampling.FindingsEQCA provides a method to generate middle-range theories by combining theoretical and empirical analysis to address and theorize the complex interactions between actors, structures and norms in international institutions. The value added by the proposed method is demonstrated with a case study of a United Nations intergovernmental working group in the issue area of business and human rights.Originality/valueBased on the concepts of interpretation and social causality, this paper contributes to the body of qualitative research that transcends the dichotomy between positivist and post-positivist approaches in the disciplines of international relations and international political theory.

Causal Emergence: When Distortions in a Map Obscure the Territory

We provide a critical assessment of the account of causal emergence presented in Erik Hoel’s 2017 article “When the map is better than the territory”. The account integrates causal and information theoretic concepts to explain under what circumstances there can be causal descriptions of a system at multiple scales of analysis. We show that the causal macro variables implied by this account result in interventions with significant ambiguity, and that the operations of marginalization and abstraction do not commute. Both of these are desiderata that, we argue, any account of multi-scale causal analysis should be sensitive to. The problems we highlight in Hoel’s definition of causal emergence derive from the use of various averaging steps and the introduction of a maximum entropy distribution that is extraneous to the system under investigation.

Embedding entropy: a nonlinear measure of dynamical causality.

Research on concepts and computational methods of causality has a long history, and there are various concepts of causality as well as corresponding computing algorithms based on measured data. Here, by considering causes and effects from a dynamical perspective, we present a unified mathematical framework for the so-called dynamical causality (DC), which can detect causal interactions over time; notably, this framework covers Granger causality, transfer entropy, embedding causality and their conditional versions. Based on this framework, we further propose a causality criterion called embedding entropy (EE) to measure the DC between two variables. Moreover, its conditional version, conditional embedding entropy (cEE), is also derived for detecting conditional/direct causality. The significant advantages of EE and cEE are that they can be employed for solving not only nonlinear causal inference but also the non-separability problem, and they can reduce the scale bias in numerical calculation. The performance and robustness of EE and cEE were demonstrated through numerical simulations, and causal inference on various real-world datasets validated their effectiveness.

The Constraints Hypothesis: Rethinking Causality in Deradicalisation, Disengagement and Reintegration Pathways. A Complex Systems Perspective

This paper re-frames the concept of causality in deradicalisation, disengagement and reintegration pathways. Analysis of the theories and frameworks in counter-terrorism research indicate that prevalent causal models offer reductive explanations of human behavior, revealing the absence of a scientifically credible account of how agents undergo transformation in pathways out of terrorism. To address the problem of causality, I borrow from the thought bank of complexity theory and reconceptualise causality as the operation of “constraints.” The paper then goes on to operationalize the concept of constraints for counter-terrorism researchers and practitioners, laying down a new and preliminary conceptual framework for thinking about how people leave terrorism behind.

Causal Predicates, Causal Principles, and the Core of Causation

How might one tackle the subject of causation with the least amount of preformed conceptions – and arrive by a series of well-motivated conceptual decisions at a concept of causation that captures the “heart of the matter”? This essay is a sustained attempt to answer this question. On the way, causal predicates of various degrees of importance are defined and causal principles of various degrees of plausibility discussed, all of this in the service of approaching, step by step, “the heart of the matter.”