Causal superseding

Kominsky, Jonathan F.; Phillips, Jonathan; Gerstenberg, Tobias; Lagnado, David A.; Knobe, Joshua

doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2015.01.013

Cited by 128 publications

(235 citation statements)

References 44 publications

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“…This feature has played a critical role, for example, in understanding human causal reasoning (25,26), modality in natural language (27), and judgments of force and freedom (28), among others (10). These models do not, however, provide evidence for how this modal representation is computed.…”

Section: Significancementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Finally, it is worth noting a potential connection between our research and the widespread, surprising presence of moral norms in disparate corners of the human mind: e.g., in causal reasoning and mental state attribution (10,25,26,29,36). These processes also involve reasoning over a set of possibilities.…”

Section: Study 3: Default Modal Representations In High-level Cognitionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Morality constrains the default representation of what is possible

Phillips

Cushman

2017

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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The capacity for representing and reasoning over sets of possibilities, or modal cognition, supports diverse kinds of high-level judgments: causal reasoning, moral judgment, language comprehension, and more. Prior research on modal cognition asks how humans explicitly and deliberatively reason about what is possible but has not investigated whether or how people have a default, implicit representation of which events are possible. We present three studies that characterize the role of implicit representations of possibility in cognition. Collectively, these studies differentiate explicit reasoning about possibilities from default implicit representations, demonstrate that human adults often default to treating immoral and irrational events as impossible, and provide a case study of high-level cognitive judgments relying on default implicit representations of possibility rather than explicit deliberation.modality | high-level cognition | morality | norms | possibility

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Section: Significancementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Study 3: Default Modal Representations In High-level Cognitionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Morality constrains the default representation of what is possible

Phillips

Cushman

2017

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

Self Cite

123

159

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“…More strikingly, these two kinds of norms show the same pattern of impact on such judgments. As a result, researchers have suggested that it might be helpful to posit a single undifferentiated notion of normality that integrates both statistical and prescriptive considerations (Halpern & Hitchcock, 2015;Kominsky et al, 2015). On this approach, an event counts as "abnormal" to the extent that it either violates a statistical norm or violates a prescriptive norm, and as "normal" to the extent that it follows both of these types of norms.…”

Section: Three Effects Of Normality On Actual Causation Judgmentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…One intriguing phenomenon that has long been recognized is that people's judgments of actual causation can be influenced by the degree to which they regard certain events as normal. In recent years, this effect has been explored both in experimental studies and in formal models (e.g., Halpern & Hitchcock, 2015;Kominsky, Phillips, Gerstenberg, Lagnado, & Knobe, 2015;Phillips, Luguri, & Knobe, 2015).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Normality and actual causal strength

2017

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Existing research suggests that people's judgments of actual causation can be influenced by the degree to which they regard certain events as normal. We develop an explanation for this phenomenon that draws on standard tools from the literature on graphical causal models and, in particular, on the idea of probabilistic sampling. Using these tools, we propose a new measure of actual causal strength. This measure accurately captures three effects of normality on causal judgment that have been observed in existing studies. More importantly, the measure predicts a new effect ("abnormal deflation"). Two studies show that people's judgments do, in fact, show this new effect. Taken together, the patterns of people's causal judgments thereby provide support for the proposed explanation.

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“…Further, background empirical work suggests that people tend to take an agentive perspective on nature as a whole (see e.g., Bloom, 2007;Kelemen, 2012;Rose, 2015;Rose and Schaffer, 2015), providing reason to expect that people will hold non-agents responsible. Second, it might be argued that the fourth experiment in Kominsky et al (2015) provides empirical evidence suggesting that statistical norms play an independent role in folk causal attributions. In this study participants were presented with a scenario where Alex plays a game that involves both flipping a coin and rolling a pair of dice.…”

Section: Revising the Dtn Accountsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Following the FAD: Folk Attributions and Theories of Actual Causation

2016

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Abstract. In the last decade, several researchers have proposed theories of actual causation that make use of structural equations and directed graphs. Many of these researchers are committed to a widely-endorsed folk attribution desideratum (FAD), according to which an important constraint on the acceptability of a theory of actual causation is agreement between the deliverances of the theory with respect to specific cases and the reports of untutored individuals about those same cases. In the present article, we consider a small collection of related theories of actual causation: the purely structural theory developed in Halpern and Pearl (2005), and two theories that supplement the structural equations with considerations of defaults, typicality, and normality- Hitchcock (2007a) and Halpern and Hitchcock (2015). We argue that each of these three theories are meant to satisfy the FAD, then present empirical evidence that they fail to do so for several variations on a simple scenario from the literature. Drawing on the responsibility view of folk causal attributions suggested by Sytsma, Livengood, and Rose (2012), we conclude by offering a solution that allows the latter two theories to satisfy the FAD for these cases. The solution is to give up on concerns with typicality and focus on injunctive norms in supplementing the graphical modeling machinery.Imagine a trolley beginning its descent down a steep hill on a rainy night. Before it begins to move, the brake operator says to the conductor of the trolley, "The cable has come loose, so if we need to slow down on the descent, we will have to rely exclusively on the handbrake." The conductor decides to proceed anyway. Halfway down the hill, the brake fails, and the out-of- We hold that the shift toward DTN accounts moves theories of actual causation in the right direction for purposes of satisfying the FAD, and in this paper, we will provide new 1 We will restrict talk of "folk causal attributions" to judgments about causation in concrete cases, such as the trolley case given above. 2 Some commitment to common sense, intuitions, or the like has been very common in work on the metaphysics of causation. Paul and Hall (2013) offer a notable dissent in their "Rule five," which admonishes us not to enshrine intuitions. However, in fleshing out what they mean, they clearly state that they take intuitions to be valuable. "We think it is important to take intuitions very seriously, and we will do so throughout this book, paying special attention to places where our intuitions are in tension, since we take intuitions to be important guides to what we think we know about ontological structure, and the existence of said tensions indicate the need for further analysis. But intuitions must be used with care" (41). 3 experimental evidence supporting that assessment. However, we will also present evidence that current DTN accounts fail to satisfy the FAD for some simple cases. We argue that the DTN accounts we consider fail to satisfy the FAD because they have not given suffic...

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Causal superseding

Cited by 128 publications

References 44 publications

Morality constrains the default representation of what is possible

Morality constrains the default representation of what is possible

Normality and actual causal strength

Following the FAD: Folk Attributions and Theories of Actual Causation

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