Causal Learning: Psychology, Philosophy, and ComputationAlison Gopnik, Laura Schulz Understanding causal structure is a central task of human cognition. Causal learning underpins the development of our concepts and categories, our intuitive theories, and our capacities for planning, imagination and inference. During the last few years, there has been an interdisciplinary revolution in our understanding of learning and reasoning: Researchers in philosophy, psychology, and computation have discovered new mechanisms for learning the causal structure of the world. This new work provides a rigorous, formal basis for theory theories of concepts and cognitive development, and moreover, the causal learning mechanisms it has uncovered go dramatically beyond the traditional mechanisms of both nativist theories, such as modularity theories, and empiricist ones, such as association or connectionism. |
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Page 12
... condition on causal inference and why covariation is not, in general, equivalent to causation. A parallel account explains inferences about candidate inhibitory causes. Although compelling as a psychological account of human causal ...
... condition on causal inference and why covariation is not, in general, equivalent to causation. A parallel account explains inferences about candidate inhibitory causes. Although compelling as a psychological account of human causal ...
Page 22
... conditions for an intervention. Moreover, I also think that it is a plausible empirical conjecture that humans and some other ... condition for X to be a direct cause of Y with respect to some variable set V is that there be a possible ...
... conditions for an intervention. Moreover, I also think that it is a plausible empirical conjecture that humans and some other ... condition for X to be a direct cause of Y with respect to some variable set V is that there be a possible ...
Page 23
... condition CM, according to which, conditional on its direct causes, every variable is independent of every other variable, singly or in combination, except for its effects. Given this assumption, both structures 1-1 and 1-2 imply ...
... condition CM, according to which, conditional on its direct causes, every variable is independent of every other variable, singly or in combination, except for its effects. Given this assumption, both structures 1-1 and 1-2 imply ...
Page 24
... conditions in TC, people will judge that C causes E even if there appears to be a spatiotemporal gap between C and E. Moreover, even if there is a connecting spatiotemporally continuous process from C to E, they will judge that C does ...
... conditions in TC, people will judge that C causes E even if there appears to be a spatiotemporal gap between C and E. Moreover, even if there is a connecting spatiotemporally continuous process from C to E, they will judge that C does ...
Page 29
... condition (a) differently from the observation condition (b). For example, they judge that the probability of A is higher in the intervention condition than in the observation condition; that is, they do not backtrack in the former and ...
... condition (a) differently from the observation condition (b). For example, they judge that the probability of A is higher in the intervention condition than in the observation condition; that is, they do not backtrack in the former and ...
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Causal Learning: Psychology, Philosophy, and Computation Alison Gopnik,Laura Schulz Limited preview - 2007 |
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