PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE SEMINAR, Reichenbach's Common Cause Principle

Department of History and Philosophy of Science Eotvos University Budapest, Pazmany P. setany 1/A PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE SEMINAR (http://hps.elte.hu/seminar) ________________________________________________ 21 May 4:00 PM 6th floor 6.54 (Language: English, except all participants speak Hungarian) Panel Discussion Panelists: Balázs Gyenis* Gábor Hofer-Szabó* György Kampis* Miklós Rédei* László E. Szabó* Péter Szegedi* Moderator: Márta Fehér** _____________ * HPS, Eötvös University, Budapest ** Philosophy, Technical University, Budapest Reichenbach's Common Cause Principle No correlation without causation. This is, in its most compact and general formulation, the essence of what became called the Common Cause Principle (CCP). If two events A and B are (positively) correlated, p(A&B)>p(A)p(B), then either there is a causal connection between A and B that brings about the correlation or there is a third event C (common cause) that stands in a causal connection with A and B, and it is this C that causes the correlation, that is, (1) p(A&B|C)=p(A|C)p(B|C) (2) p(A&B|notC)=p(A|notC)p(B|notC) (3) p(A&C)>p(A)p(C) (4) p(B&C)>p(B)p(C) A part of the panelists believe that - although some slight modifications of the original Reichenbachian conception seem necessary - (1)-(4) express the proper mathematical formulation of our causal intuition, and are never violated in reality. Some others argue that Reichenbach's concept of common cause is completely pointless and does not apply for many correlations in our world. Suggested readings: - H. Reichenbach: The Direction of Time, University of California Press, Los Angeles,1956, pp. 157-167. - G. Hofer-Szabó, M. Rédei and L. E. Szabó: Reichenbach's Common Cause Principle: Recent Results and Open Questions, Reports on Philosophy, No. 20. (2001) - E. Sober: The principle of the common cause, in J. H. Fetzer (ed.), Probability and Causality, Reidel Pub. Co., Boston,1988. - E. Sober: Common cause explanation, Philosophy of Science, 51 (1984) 212-241. - N. Cartwright: How to tell a common cause - Generalization of the conjunctive fork criterion, in J. H. Fetzer (ed.), Probability and Causality, Reidel Pub. Co., Boston,1988. - Hofer-Szabó, G., Rédei, M., Szabó, L. E., On Reichenbach's common cause principle and Reichenbach's notion of common cause, The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 50 (1999), 377-399. The organizer of the seminar: László E. Szabó -- Laszlo E. Szabo Department of Theoretical Physics Department of History and Philosophy of Science Eotvos University, Budapest H-1518 Budapest, Pf. 32, Hungary Phone/Fax: (36-1)372-2924 Home: (36-1) 200-7318 Mobil/SMS: (36) 20-366-1172 http://hps.elte.hu/~leszabo