학술논문

Evidence for interactive common causes. Resuming the Cartwright-Hausman-Woodward debate
Document Type
Original Paper
Source
European Journal for Philosophy of Science. 12(1)
Subject
Interactive common causes
Screening-off
Causal Markov condition
Reichenbach’s principle of the common cause
Modularity
Independent fixability
Independent disruptability
Entanglement
EPR experiments
Causal modelling
Interventionist theories of causation
Causal Bayes nets
Language
English
ISSN
1879-4912
1879-4920
Abstract
The most serious candidates for common causes that fail to screen off (‘interactive common causes’, ICCs) and thus violate the causal Markov condition (CMC) refer to quantum phenomena. In her seminal debate with Hausman and Woodward, Cartwright early on focussed on unfortunate non-quantum examples. Especially, Hausman and Woodward’s redescriptions of quantum cases saving the CMC remain unchallenged. This paper takes up this lose end of the discussion and aims to resolve the debate in favour of Cartwright’s position. It systematically considers redescriptions of ICC structures, including those by Hausman and Woodward, and explains why these are inappropriate, when quantum mechanics (in an objective collapse interpretation) is true. It first shows that all cases of purported quantum ICCs are cases of entanglement and then, using the tools of causal modelling, it provides an analysis of the quantum mechanical formalism for the case that the collapse of entangled systems is best described as a causal model with an ICC.