Event Causation Research Articles

Thing causation

AbstractAccording to orthodoxy, the most fundamental kind of causation involves one event causing another event. I argue against this event‐causal view. Instead, the most fundamental kind of causation is thing causation, which involves a thing causing a thing to do something. Event causation is reducible to thing causation, but thing causation is not reducible to event causation, because event causation cannot accommodate cases of fine‐grained causation. I defend my view from objections, including C. D. Broad's influential “timing” argument, and I conclude with implications for agent‐causal theories of free will.

COVID-19 medical waste transportation risk evaluation integrating type-2 fuzzy total interpretive structural modeling and Bayesian network

With the amount of medical waste rapidly increasing since the corona virus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, medical waste treatment risk evaluation has become an important task. The transportation of medical waste is an essential process of medical waste treatment. This paper aims to develop an integrated model to evaluate COVID-19 medical waste transportation risk by integrating an extended type-2 fuzzy total interpretive structural model (TISM) with a Bayesian network (BN). First, an interval type-2 fuzzy based transportation risk rating scale is introduced to help experts express uncertain evaluation information, in which a new double alpha-cut method is developed for the defuzzification of the interval type-2 fuzzy numbers (IT2FNs). Second, TISM is combined with IT2FNs to construct a hierarchical structural model of COVID-19 medical waste transportation risk factors under a high uncertain environment; a new bidirectional extraction method is proposed to describe the hierarchy of risk factors more reasonably and accurately. Third, the BN is integrated with IT2FNs to make a comprehensive medical waste transportation risk evaluation, including identifying the sensitive factors and diagnosing the event's causation. Then, a case study of COVID-19 medical waste transportation is displayed to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model. Further, a comparison of the proposed model with the traditional TISM and BN model is conducted to stress the advantages of the proposed model.

Agent Causation Is Not Prior to Event Causation

AbstractMy aim in this paper is to argue against the claim that agent causation is more fundamental than event causation. To accomplish this aim, I shall first briefly discuss the motivation behind agent causation. Second, I shall highlight the differences between agent causation and event causation. Third, I shall begin briefly with the weaker claim held by Timothy O’Connor and Randolph Clarke that there is no good reason to believe that event causation is more fundamental than agent causation. Fourth, I shall discuss the stronger claim held by E. J. Lowe that agent causation is more fundamental than event causation, and raise objections against the various arguments Lowe advances for the stronger claim. To the extent that my objections against Lowe’s stronger claim succeed, they raise questions for O’Connor’s and Clarke’s weaker claim.

Metaphysical Foundations of Causation: Powers or Laws of Nature?

Abstract In this article, I discuss Richard Swinburne’s case for the conception of substance causation, identified with the substances-powers-liabilities (SPL) account of causation, versus the conception of event causation, identified with alternative accounts. I specify the place of Swinburne’s argument in the debates about agent causation, and uncover reasons to be sceptical about the claims that substance causation is a genuine alternative to event causation, and that it helps to comprehend the specifics of the causation involved in free agency. I also advance considerations in favour of the relations-between-universals (RBU) account of causation that can make it preferable to the SPL account.

Learning from Incidents: A Qualitative Study in the Continuing Airworthiness Sector

Learning from incidents (LFI) is a useful approach when examining past events and developing measures to prevent ensuing recurrence. Although the reporting of incidents in the aircraft maintenance and continuing airworthiness domain is well appointed, it is often unclear how the maximum effect of safety data can be efficaciously applied in support of LFI in the area. From semi-structured interviews, with thirty-four participants, the gathered data were thematically analyzed with the support of NVivo software. This study establishes a relationship between an incident in its lifecycle and the learning process. The main aim of this work is to elucidate factors that enable LFI. The analysis of the data revealed, for example, the benefits of a just culture and the use of formal continuation training programs in this respect. Moreover, it identified limitations inherent in current processes such as poor event causation and poorly designed learning syllabi. Additionally, aspects such as a lack of regulatory requirements for competence in the areas of learning for managers and accountable persons currently exist. This thematic analysis could be used in support of organizations examining their own processes for learning from incidents. Additionally, it can support the development of terms of reference for a continuing airworthiness regulatory working group to examine, strengthen and better apply LFI in the aviation industry.

Abstract 465: High Circulating Levels of 8-OHdG are an Independent Predictor of Subsequent MACE

Objective: Oxidative stress is associated with several cardiovascular risk factors and cardiovascular disease. Damaged cells release cell-free DNA (cfDNA) into the circulation; oxidized cfDNA presence in the plasma indicates a pathological process in the context of oxidative stress. We hypothesized that biomarker of oxidative DNA damage 8-hydroxy- 2’deoxyguanosine (8-OHdG) may be associated with incident major adverse cardiovascular events (MACE). Methods: Plasma samples from 84 consenting patients undergoing coronary angiography at Intermountain Healthcare were obtained at the time of the procedure and tested for 8-OHdG by ELISA. Study endpoints were subsequent myocardial infarction (MI), stroke and all-cause death (determined by electronic medical records and death certificates) within median follow-up of 10 years (IQR: 8.8, 10.6). Cox-proportional hazard analysis was used for examining MACE rate association by quartile of 8-OHdG. Results: Mean 8-OHdG was significantly higher for individuals with a subsequent MACE vs those without (124.8 and 98.7 nM, respectively; p<0.006, t-test). No other baseline demographic was significantly associated with 8-OHdG. MACE rates by 8-OHdG quartiles revealed a significant trend (p = 0.0346) (Figure). Hazard ratio increased by 1.653 for every 42 unit increase in 8-OHdG, p=0.006. Conclusion: High 8-OHdG plasma levels independently predict subsequent MACE. Whether 8-OHdG is contributes etiologically to event causation needs to be determined.

A Flexible Hierarchical Bayesian Modeling Technique for Risk Analysis of Major Accidents.

Safety analysis of rare events with potentially catastrophic consequences is challenged by data scarcity and uncertainty. Traditional causation-based approaches, such as fault tree and event tree (used to model rare event), suffer from a number of weaknesses. These include the static structure of the event causation, lack of event occurrence data, and need for reliable prior information. In this study, a new hierarchical Bayesian modeling based technique is proposed to overcome these drawbacks. The proposed technique can be used as a flexible technique for risk analysis of major accidents. It enables both forward and backward analysis in quantitative reasoning and the treatment of interdependence among the model parameters. Source-to-source variability in data sources is also taken into account through a robust probabilistic safety analysis. The applicability of the proposed technique has been demonstrated through a case study in marine and offshore industry.

Absence Causation and a Liberal Theory of Causal Explanation

For the framework of event causation—i.e. the framework according to which causation is a relation between events—absences or omissions pose a problem. Absences, it is generally agreed, are not events; so, under the framework of event causation, they cannot be causally related. But, as a matter of fact, absences are often taken to be causes or effects. The problem of absence causation is thus how to make sense of causation that apparently involves absences as causes or effects. In an influential paper, Helen Beebee offers a partial solution to the problem by giving an account of causation by absence (i.e. causation in which absences are supposed to be causes). I argue that Beebee's account can be extended to cover causation of absence (i.e. causation in which absences are supposed to be effects) as well. More importantly, I argue that the extended Beebeeian account calls for a major modification to David Lewis's theory of causal explanation, usually taken as standard. Compared to the standard theory, the result of this modification, which I shall call ‘the liberal theory of causal explanation’, has, among other things, the advantage of being able to accommodate causal explanations in which the explananda are not given in terms of events.

First Causes: Divine and Human

The paper analyzes the concept of a first cause, both for event causation and for agent causation. It turns out that one is rather ready to believe in the existence of first causes that are events, but not in the existence of first causes that are agents. The paper, however, develops and defends a complex argument to the conclusion that there is a first agent-cause. one version of that argument proves – not necessarily the existence of God – but still the existence of a godlike agent. Finally, the notion of a first agent-cause is employed for an analysis of freely willed human action.

Corrective Organizational Action in Response to Adverse Events at an Academic Medical Center

This paper explores the planning and implementation of corrective action in response to identified adverse events at a large high-performing teaching hospital. A mixed methodological approach that combined interviews with clinical and administrative actors and statistical analysis of 405 non-routine adverse events that occurred at the hospital over a 30-month period was employed to identify factors associated with corrective action prescription and completion. Analysis of qualitative and quantitative data indicated that corrective action planning and implementation in response to adverse events were shaped by institutional influences on the hospital’s quality management practices, predominantly state-level regulation that required corrective action for externally-reportable events and professional norms that discouraged organizational intervention in autonomous clinician practice. In logistic regression models, odds of planning a corrective action in response to an adverse event increased with regulatory reportability of the event, litigation risk of the event, number of departments involved in the event, and full or partial event causation by protocol violation or coordination error. Severity of injury to the patient was not identified as a predictor of corrective action planning. The odds of corrective action implementation were greater for action types involving remedial retraining or reinforcement of standards and those involving interventions in the task environment, while corrective actions involving interventions in professional roles and interactions were associated with a statistically-significant decreased odds of completion. Rates of completion were generally low across action categories, which interviews and medical case data analysis indicate may have been a product of diffuse responsibility for implementation among practicing clinicians untrained in process change, unrealistic action planning, and normative barriers to intervention in professional practice. Findings from this case study site shed light on the resilience of work process failure in health care delivery organizations and emphasize the importance of resource appropriation, goal-setting and change management support that meet the formidable challenges of effecting change in these and other complex, high-risk task settings.

Exposure-based cycling crash, near miss and injury rates: The Safer Cycling Prospective Cohort Study protocol

IntroductionThere are clear personal, social and environmental benefits of cycling. However, safety concerns are among the frequently cited barriers to cycling. In Australia, there are no exposure-based measures of the...

Causal Slingshots

Causal slingshots are formal arguments advanced by proponents of an event ontology of token-level causation which, in the end, are intended to show two things: (i) The logical form of statements expressing causal dependencies on token level features a binary predicate “… causes …” and (ii) that predicate takes events as arguments. Even though formalisms are only revealing with respect to the logical form of natural language statements, if the latter are shown to be adequately captured within a corresponding formalism, proponents of slingshots usually take the adequacy of their formalizations for granted without justifying it. The first part of this paper argues that the most discussed version of a causal slingshot, viz. the one e.g. presented by Davidson (Essays on actions and events. Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1980), can indeed be refuted for relying on an inadequate formal apparatus. In contrast, the formal means of Godel’s (The philosophy of Betrand Russell. New York, Tudor, 1944) often neglected slingshot are shown to stand on solid ground in the second part of the paper. Nonetheless, I contend that Godel’s slingshot does only half the work friends of event causation would like it to do. It provides good reasons for (i) but not for (ii).

Excluding exclusion: the natural(istic) dualist approach

The exclusion problem for mental causation is one of the most discussed puzzles in the mind–body literature. There has been a general agreement among philosophers, especially because most of them are committed to some form of physicalism, that the dualist cannot escape the exclusion problem. I argue that a proper understanding of dualism – its form, commitments, and intuitions – makes the exclusion problem irrelevant from a dualist perspective. The paper proposes a dualist approach, based on a theory of event causation, according to which events are medium-grained, namely parsed into mental and physical property components. A theory of contrastive mental causation is built upon this theory of events, for which the problem of exclusion does not arise.

Estimating Preventable Fractions of Disease Caused by a Specified Biological Mechanism: PAHs in Smoking Lung Cancers as an Example

Epidemiology textbooks often interpret population attributable fractions based on 2 x 2 tables or logistic regression models of exposure-response associations as preventable fractions, i.e., as fractions of illnesses in a population that would be prevented if exposure were removed. In general, this causal interpretation is not correct, since statistical association need not indicate causation; moreover, it does not identify how much risk would be prevented by removing specific constituents of complex exposures. This article introduces and illustrates an approach to calculating useful bounds on preventable fractions, having valid causal interpretations, from the types of partial but useful molecular epidemiological and biological information often available in practice. The method applies probabilistic risk assessment concepts from systems reliability analysis, together with bounding constraints for the relationship between event probabilities and causation (such as that the probability that exposure X causes response Y cannot exceed the probability that exposure X precedes response Y, or the probability that both X and Y occur) to bound the contribution to causation from specific causal pathways. We illustrate the approach by estimating an upper bound on the contribution to lung cancer risk made by a specific, much-discussed causal pathway that links smoking to a polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon (PAH) (specifically, benzo(a)pyrene diol epoxide-DNA) adducts at hot spot codons at p53 in lung cells. The result is a surprisingly small preventable fraction (of perhaps 7% or less) for this pathway, suggesting that it will be important to consider other mechanisms and non-PAH constituents of tobacco smoke in designing less risky tobacco-based products.

When political philosophy meets moral psychology: Expressivism in theMencius

A casual survey of the backgrounds of the contributors to this journal, as well as to our sister journals such as Philosophy East & West, Journal of Chinese Philosophy, and Asian Philosophy, shows that most of the contributors are university teachers in departments of philosophy or religious studies. This partly explains why, in our studies of classical Chinese philosophy, we have a characteristically analytic approach to texts. The strength of this approach is that our passion for rigorous arguments leads to thorough analysis of early Chinese philosophical texts that focuses on how an author states his or her theory and argues for it. However, this approach does have its weaknesses. When we focus on the arguments in the texts, we tend to see these early Chinese philosophers only as scholars; we easily forget that many of them were also political advisors or consultants, and the audience of their arguments was often a powerful ruler. One of the main goals of this article is to show that we cannot study Mencius’ moral psychology without studying his political philosophy at the same time. More specifically, this article shows that Mencius’ expressivist moral psychology is the result of his responding to certain questions and debates in the political philosophy of his time. I believe that our study can also shed light on a debate among contemporary scholars who study philosophical psychology or philosophy of action in early China. Herbert Fingarette is probably the first to claim that Confucius did not have the concepts of “choice,” “choosing,” “deciding,” or “inner life” (Fingarette: 18-56). Chad Hansen claims that classical Chinese thinkers made no distinction between human actions and the natural course of events, nor did they have the distinction between “agent causation” and “event causation” (Hansen: 378). According to Henry Rosemont, classical Chinese thinkers did not have concepts of (or words for) “action,” “rational agent,” or “choice”

Libertarianism, Luck, and Action Explanation

My primary objective is to motivate the concern that leading libertarian views of free action seem unable to account for an agent's behavior in a way that reveals an explanatorily apt connection between the agent's prior reasons and the intentional behavior to be explained. I argue that it is this lack of a suitable reasons explanation of purportedly free decisions that underpins the objection that agents who act with the pertinent sort of libertarian freedom cannot be morally responsible for what they do because their intentional behavior is a matter of luck. The accounts scrutinized include a Kane-type event-causal view, Clarke's account that appeals to both agent causation and event causation in the production of free action, and O'Connor's pure agent-causal account. I conclude by discussing an advantage these libertarian accounts enjoy over compatibilist contenders: they possess a feature necessary to accommodate the truth of judgments of moral obligation.

Van Gulick’s solution of the exclusion problem revisited

The anti-reductionist who wants to preserve the causal efficacy of mental phenomena faces several problems in regard to mental causation, i.e. mental events which cause other events, arising from her desire to accept the ontological primacy of the physical and at the same time save the special character of the mental. Psychology tries to persuade us of the former, appealing thereby to the results of experiments carried out in neurology; the latter is, however, deeply rooted in our everyday actions and beliefs and despite the constant opposition of science still very much alive. Difficulties, however, arise from a combination of two claims that are widely accepted in philosophy of mind, namely, physical monism and mental realism, the acceptance of which leads us to the greatest problem of mental causation: the problem of causal exclusion. Since physical causes alone are always sufficient for physical effects mental properties are excluded from causal explanations of our behaviour, which makes them “epiphenomenal”. The article introduces Van Gulick’s solution to the exclusion problem which tries to prove that physical properties, in contrast to mental properties, do not have as much of a privileged status with respect to event causation as usually ascribed. Therefore, it makes no sense to say that physical properties are causally relevant whereas mental properties are not. This is followed by my objection to his argument for levelling mental and physical properties with respect to causation of events. I try to show that Van Gulick’s argument rests on a premise that no serious physicalist can accept.

Personal Agency

Why does the problem of free will seem so intractable? I surmise that in large measure it does so because the free will debate, at least in its modern form, is conducted in terms of a mistaken approach to causality in general. At the heart of this approach is the assumption that all causation is fundamentally event causation. Of course, it is well-known that some philosophers of action want to invoke in addition an irreducible notion of agent causation, applicable only in the sphere of intelligent agency. But such a view is generally dismissed as incompatible with the naturalism that has now become orthodoxy amongst mainstream analytical philosophers of mind. What I want to argue is that substances, not events, are the primary relata of causal relations and that agent causation should properly be conceived of as a species of substance causation. I shall try to show that by thus reconceiving the nature of causation and of agency, the problem of free will can be made more tractable. I shall also argue for a contention that may seem even less plausible at first sight, namely, that such a view of agency is perfectly compatible with a volitionist theory of action.

On the logic of event causation. Part I. Fundamental reflections

The paper outlines an analysis of token causation. It contains reasons for the choice of event tokens and a list of properties of causal relations. After defining the notion event it is shown, in which form classical philosophical problems arise and how they can be solved: Causality is interpreted as an second order property of first order relations. Temporal order can be induced from causal order. Token causation does not involve neither any kind of necessity, nor probability. Causal laws are generalizations on sentences about token causation by quantifying over event types. Two explications of Causal law are suggested, differing in the ability of allowing for exceptions.

Event Causation and Agent Causation

It is a matter of dispute whether we should acknowledge the existence of two distinct species of causation – event causation and agent causation – and, if we should, whether either species of causation is reducible to the other. In this paper, the prospects for such a reduction either way are considered, the conclusion being that a reduction of event causation to agent causation is the more promising option. Agent causation, in the sense understood here, is taken to include but not to be restricted to the intentional causation of an event by a rational agent. But, it is argued, there are certain special features of intentional causation, understood as a sub-species of agent causation, which make the agent-causation approach to human agency a particularly promising one with which to tackle the problem of free will.