This book collects research papers on the philosophical foundations of probability, causality, spacetime and quantum theory. The papers are related to talks presented in six subsequent workshops organized by The Budapest-Krakow Research Group on Probability, Causality and Determinism. Coverage consists of three parts. Part I focuses on the notion of probability from a general philosophical and formal epistemological perspective. Part II applies probabilistic considerations to address causal questions in the foundations of quantum mechanics. Part III investigates the question of indeterminism in spacetime theories. It also explores some related questions, such as decidability and observation. The contributing authors are all philosophers of science with a strong background in mathematics or physics. They believe that paying attention to the finer formal details often helps avoiding pitfalls that exacerbate the philosophical problems that are in the center of focus of contemporary research. The papers presented here help make explicit the mathematical-structural assumptions that underlie key philosophical argumentations. This formally rigorous and conceptually precise approach will appeal to researchers and philosophers as well as mathematicians and statisticians.

This book summarizes the results of research the authors have pursued in the past years on the problem of implementing Bell's notion of local causality in local physical theories and relating it to other important concepts and principles in the foundations of physics such as the Common Cause Principle, Bell's inequalities, the EPR (Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen) scenario, and various other locality and causality concepts. The book is intended for philosophers of science with an interest in the formal background of sciences, philosophers of physics and physicists working in foundation of physics.

This book collects research papers on the philosophical foundations of probability, causality, spacetime and quantum theory. The papers are related to talks presented in six subsequent workshops organized by The Budapest-Krakow Research Group on Probability, Causality and Determinism. Coverage consists of three parts. Part I focuses on the notion of probability from a general philosophical and formal epistemological perspective. Part II applies probabilistic considerations to address causal questions in the foundations of quantum mechanics. Part III investigates the question of indeterminism in spacetime theories. It also explores some related questions, such as decidability and observation. The contributing authors are all philosophers of science with a strong background in mathematics or physics. They believe that paying attention to the finer formal details often helps avoiding pitfalls that exacerbate the philosophical problems that are in the center of focus of contemporary research. The papers presented here help make explicit the mathematical-structural assumptions that underlie key philosophical argumentations. This formally rigorous and conceptually precise approach will appeal to researchers and philosophers as well as mathematicians and statisticians.

The common cause principle says that every correlation is either due to a direct causal effect linking the correlated entities or is brought about by a third factor, a so-called common cause. The principle is of central importance in the philosophy of science, especially in causal explanation, causal modeling and in the foundations of quantum physics. Written for philosophers of science, physicists and statisticians, this book contributes to the debate over the validity of the common cause principle, by proving results that bring to the surface the nature of explanation by common causes. It provides a technical and mathematically rigorous examination of the notion of common cause, providing an analysis not only in terms of classical probability measure spaces, which is typical in the available literature, but in quantum probability theory as well. The authors provide numerous open problems to further the debate and encourage future research in this field.