Cost and Actual Causation
Artificial Intelligence
2017-08-01 v1
Abstract
I propose the purpose our concept of actual causation serves is minimizing various cost in intervention practice. Actual causation has three features: nonredundant sufficiency, continuity and abnormality; these features correspond to the minimization of exploitative cost, exploratory cost and risk cost in intervention practice. Incorporating these three features, a definition of actual causation is given. I test the definition in 66 causal cases from actual causation literature and show that this definition's application fit intuition better than some other causal modelling based definitions.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1707.09704,
title = {Cost and Actual Causation},
author = {Liang Zhou},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1707.09704},
year = {2017}
}
Comments
37 pages, 2 Appendixes