Measuring Causal Specificity

Philosophy of Science 82 (4):529-555 (2015)
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Abstract

Several authors have argued that causes differ in the degree to which they are ‘specific’ to their effects. Woodward has used this idea to enrich his influential interventionist theory of causal explanation. Here we propose a way to measure causal specificity using tools from information theory. We show that the specificity of a causal variable is not well-defined without a probability distribution over the states of that variable. We demonstrate the tractability and interest of our proposed measure by measuring the specificity of coding DNA and other factors in a simple model of the production of mRNA.

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Author Profiles

Hyunju Kim
Tsinghua University (PhD)
Brett Calcott
University of Sydney
Karola Stotz
Last affiliation: Macquarie University
1 more

References found in this work

Causation as influence.David Lewis - 2000 - Journal of Philosophy 97 (4):182-197.
Causes That Make a Difference.C. Kenneth Waters - 2007 - Journal of Philosophy 104 (11):551-579.
A Mathematical Theory of Communication.Claude Elwood Shannon - 1948 - Bell System Technical Journal 27 (April 1924):379–423.

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