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Is Determinism More Favorable than Indeterminism for the Causal Markov Condition?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Isabelle Drouet
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Abstract

The present text comments on Steel 2005, in which the author claims to extend from the deterministic to the general case, the result according to which the causal Markov condition is satisfied by systems with jointly independent exogenous variables. I show that Steel's claim cannot be accepted unless one is prepared to abandon standard causal modeling terminology. Correlatively, I argue that the most fruitful aspect of Steel 2005 consists in a realist conception of error terms, and I show how this conception sheds new light on the relationship between determinism and the causal Markov condition.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 76 , Issue 5 , December 2009 , pp. 662 - 675
Copyright
Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

‡

For help on this article, I would like to thank Anouk Barberousse, Donald Gillies, Fanny Soubiran, and two anonymous referees.

References

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