Causal Propensity: A Review
Irving John Good · PSA Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association · 1984
“We can judge of the perfection to which a science has come by the facility, more or less great, with which it may be approached by calculation.” Quetelet (1828), as quoted by Landau & Lazarsfeld in theInternational Encyclopedia of Statistics(p. 828). Suppose that some event F occurs and later an event E either occurs or does not. I am going to talk aboutthe extent to whichFtends to causeE, orthe causal propensityof Eprovided byF, orthe propensity or tendency of F to causeE, denoted by Q(E:F). For example, F might be the event that the captain of a firing squad shouts “Fire” and E might be that the shootee's life is_ Ended (F for Fire, E for Ended). The negation of E is denoted by E, which in this example means that the shootee does not drop dead.