Actual Causality (Hardcover)

Causality plays a central role in the way people structure the world; we constantly seek causal explanations for our observations. But what does it even mean that an event C "actually caused" event E? The problem of defining actual causation goes beyond mere philosophical speculation. For example, in many legal arguments, it is precisely what needs to be established in order to determine responsibility. The philosophy literature has been struggling with the problem of defining causality since Hume.

In this book, Joseph Halpern explores actual causality, and such related notions as degree of responsibility, degree of blame, and causal explanation. The goal is to arrive at a definition of causality that matches our natural language usage and is helpful, for example, to a jury deciding a legal case, a programmer looking for the line of code that cause some software to fail, or an economist trying to determine whether austerity caused a subsequent depression.

Halpern applies and expands an approach to causality that he and Judea Pearl developed, based on structural equations. He carefully formulates a definition of causality, and building on this, defines degree of responsibility, degree of blame, and causal explanation. He concludes by discussing how these ideas can be applied to such practical problems as accountability and program verification. Technical details are generally confined to the final section of each chapter and can be skipped by non-mathematical readers.

因果關係在人們結構世界的方式中扮演著核心角色；我們不斷尋求對觀察結果的因果解釋。但是，事件C「實際上導致」事件E是什麼意思呢？定義實際因果關係的問題超越了純粹的哲學推測。例如，在許多法律辯論中，確定責任正是需要確立的事情。自休謨以來，哲學文獻一直在努力解決定義因果關係的問題。

在這本書中，約瑟夫·哈爾彭探討了實際因果關係，以及與之相關的概念，如責任程度、指責程度和因果解釋。目標是得出一個符合我們自然語言使用的因果關係定義，並且對於決定法律案件的陪審團、尋找導致軟體故障的程式碼行的程式設計師，或試圖確定緊縮政策是否導致後續經濟衰退的經濟學家等有幫助。

哈爾彭應用並擴展了他和朱迪亞·珀爾基於結構方程所開發的因果關係方法。他仔細制定了因果關係的定義，並在此基礎上定義了責任程度、指責程度和因果解釋。最後，他討論了如何將這些想法應用於責任和程式驗證等實際問題。技術細節通常僅限於每章的最後一節，非數學讀者可以跳過這部分。