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Published 2010 | public
Book Section - Chapter

Actual Causation and the Art of Modeling

Abstract

[Introduction] In The Graduate, Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman) is told that the future can be summed up in one word: "Plastics". One of us (Halpern) recalls that in roughly 1990, Judea Pearl told him that the future was in causality. Pearl's own research was largely focused on causality in the years after that; his seminal contributions are widely known. We were among the many influenced by his work. We discuss one aspect of it, actual causation, in this article, although a number of our comments apply to causal modeling more generally.

Additional Information

© 2010 College Publications. We thank Wolfgang Spohn for useful comments. Joseph Halpern was supported in part by NSF grants IIS-0534064 and IIS-08l2045, and by AFOSR grants FA9550-08-1-0438 and FA9550-05-1-0055.

Additional details

Created:
August 19, 2023
Modified:
January 13, 2024