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This collection of essays is dedicated to 'Joe' Karel Lambert. The
contributors are all personally affected to Joe in some way or
other, but they are definitely not the only ones. Whatever excuses
there are - there are some -, the editors apologize to whomever
they have neglected. But even so the collection displays how
influential Karel Lambert has been, personally and through his
teaching and his writings. The display is in alphabetical order -
with one exception: Bas van Fraassen, being about the earliest
student of Karel Lambert, opens the collection with some
reminiscences. Naturally, one of the focal points of this volume is
Lambert's logical thinking and (or: freed of) ontological thinking.
Free logic is intimately connected with description theory. Bas van
Fraassen gives a survey of the development of the area, and Charles
Daniels points to difficulties with definite descriptions in modal
contexts and stories. Peter Woodruff addresses the relation between
free logic and supervaluation semantics, presenting a novel
condition which recovers desirable metatheoretic properties for
free logic under that semantics. Terence Parsons shows how free
logic can be utilized in interpreting sentences as purporting to
denote events (true ones succeed and false ones fail) and how this
helps to understand natural language.
The papers collected here are, with three exceptions, those
presented at a conference on probability and causation held at the
University of California at Irvine on July 15-19, 1985. The
exceptions are that David Freedman and Abner Shimony were not able
to contribute the papers that they presented to this volume, and
that Clark Glymour who was not able to attend the conference did
contribute a paper. We would like to thank the National Science
Foundation and the School of Humanities of the University of
California at Irvine for generous support. WILLIAM HARPER
University of Western Ontario BRIAN SKYRMS University of California
at Irvine Vll INTRODUCTION PART I: DECISIONS AND GAMES Causal
notions have recently corne to figure prominently in discussions
about rational decision making. Indeed, a relatively influential
new approach to theorizing about rational choice has come to be
called "causal decision theory." 1 Decision problems such as
Newcombe's Problem and some versions of the Prisoner's Dilemma
where an act counts as evidence for a desired state even though the
agent knows his choice of that act cannot causally influence
whether or not the state obtains have motivated causal decision
theorists.
The papers collected here are, with three exceptions, those
presented at a conference on probability and causation held at the
University of California at Irvine on July 15-19, 1985. The
exceptions are that David Freedman and Abner Shimony were not able
to contribute the papers that they presented to this volume, and
that Clark Glymour who was not able to attend the conference did
contribute a paper. We would like to thank the National Science
Foundation and the School of Humanities of the University of
California at Irvine for generous support. WILLIAM HARPER
University of Western Ontario BRIAN SKYRMS University of California
at Irvine VII INTRODUCTION TO CAUSATION, CHANCE, AND CREDENCE The
search for causes is so central to science that it has sometimes
been taken as the defining attribute of the scientific enterprise.
Yet even after twenty-five centuries of philosophical analysis the
meaning of "cause" is still a matter of controversy, among
scientists as well as philosophers. Part of the problem is that the
servicable concepts of causation built out of Necessity,
Sufficiency, Locality, and Temporal Precedence were constructed for
a deterministic world-view which has been obsolete since the advent
of quantum theory. A physically credible theory of causation must
be, at basis, statistical. And statistical analyses of caus ation
may be of interest even when an underlying deterministic theory is
assumed, as in classical statistical mechanics."
This collection of essays is dedicated to 'Joe' Karel Lambert. The
contributors are all personally affected to Joe in some way or
other, but they are definitely not the only ones. Whatever excuses
there are - there are some -, the editors apologize to whomever
they have neglected. But even so the collection displays how
influential Karel Lambert has been, personally and through his
teaching and his writings. The display is in alphabetical order -
with one exception: Bas van Fraassen, being about the earliest
student of Karel Lambert, opens the collection with some
reminiscences. Naturally, one of the focal points of this volume is
Lambert's logical thinking and (or: freed of) ontological thinking.
Free logic is intimately connected with description theory. Bas van
Fraassen gives a survey of the development of the area, and Charles
Daniels points to difficulties with definite descriptions in modal
contexts and stories. Peter Woodruff addresses the relation between
free logic and supervaluation semantics, presenting a novel
condition which recovers desirable metatheoretic properties for
free logic under that semantics. Terence Parsons shows how free
logic can be utilized in interpreting sentences as purporting to
denote events (true ones succeed and false ones fail) and how this
helps to understand natural language.
The papers collected here are, with three exceptions, those
presented at a conference on probability and causation held at the
University of California at Irvine on July 15-19, 1985. The
exceptions are that David Freedman and Abner Shimony were not able
to contribute the papers that they presented to this volume, and
that Clark Glymour who was not able to attend the conference did
contribute a paper. We would like to thank the National Science
Foundation and the School of Humanities of the University of
California at Irvine for generous support. WILLIAM HARPER
University of Western Ontario BRIAN SKYRMS University of California
at Irvine VII INTRODUCTION TO CAUSATION, CHANCE, AND CREDENCE The
search for causes is so central to science that it has sometimes
been taken as the defining attribute of the scientific enterprise.
Yet even after twenty-five centuries of philosophical analysis the
meaning of "cause" is still a matter of controversy, among
scientists as well as philosophers. Part of the problem is that the
servicable concepts of causation built out of Necessity,
Sufficiency, Locality, and Temporal Precedence were constructed for
a deterministic world-view which has been obsolete since the advent
of quantum theory. A physically credible theory of causation must
be, at basis, statistical. And statistical analyses of caus ation
may be of interest even when an underlying deterministic theory is
assumed, as in classical statistical mechanics."
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