Actual Causes and Thought Experiments

Clark Glymour
Carnegie Mellon University and University of West Florida

Two theories proposing determinate relations of actual causation for Boolean networks are described and applied to 14 cases, at least one of which is an apparent counterexample to all theories of actual causation I know of. Both theories are founded on the idea that actual causation is based on results that appropriate experimental interventions would produce. They differ in their accounts of the relevant kinds of experimental interventions. A first theory excludes the problematic case on the grounds that it posits combinations of Boolean dependencies that are not experimentally demonstrable. A second, slightly more complex theory, motivated by treating Boolean networks as idealizations of noisy gates and by Patricia Cheng’s work on human causal judgement, does not have that restriction.