Abstract
During the past decades several philosophers of science and social scientists have been interested in the problems of causation. Recently attention has been given to probabilistic causation in dichotomous causal systems. The paper uses the basic features of probabilistic causation to argue that the causal modeling approaches developed by such researchers as Blalock (1964) and Duncan (1975) can provide, when an additional assumption is added, adequate qualitative measures of one variableś causal influence upon another. Finally, some of the difficulties and issues involved in developing adequate quantitative measures are discussed, and it is concluded that the causal modeling measures cannot provide adequate quantitative measures.
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The authors contributed equally to this research paper. We also would like to gratefully acknowledge the support of the Spencer Foundation in the preparation of this manuscript.
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Elett, F.S., Ericson, D.P. An analysis of probabilistic causation in dichotomous structures. Synthese 67, 175–193 (1986). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00540067
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00540067