The HP Definition of Causality
Joseph Yehuda Halpern · The MIT Press eBooks · 2016
Three variants of a definition of actual causality are introduced. These definition uses structural equations to model counterfactuals. The definition is shown to yield a plausible and elegant account of causation that handles well examples that have caused problems for other definitions. Although transitivity is not transitive according to this definition, conditions sufficient to guarantee transitivity of causality are provided. Although the definition given assumes that everything is known, it is shown to easily extend to a situation where there is uncertainty modeled using probability. A notion of sufficient causality is also considered, as well as causality in nonrecursive models, where there are circular dependencies