The Intransitivity of Causation Revealed in Equations and Graphs

Introduction We live in exciting times. By 'we' I mean philosophers studying nature of causation. The past decade or so has a flurry of philosophical activity aimed at cracking nut, and, surprisingly, real progress has been made. Two are especially worthy of note. First, there has been a of interest in the counterfactual theory of causation, given best-known formulation by David Lewis. Second, there has been philosophical interest in the techniques of causal modeling and employed within fields such as econometrics, , and artificial intelligence. These two developments been largely independent and addressed to different sorts of. Work in the counterfactual tradition has been primarily with issues involving "token" or "singular" causation, while in the second tradition has tended to focus on issues concerning "type-level" or "general" causation.