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On The Primitives Of Causality: From The Semantics Of Agonist And Antagonist To Models Of Accident Causation And System Safety, Loïc Brevault, Francesca Favaro, Joseph Saleh

Faculty Publications

Controversial discussions on causality have been present in ancient philosophy since the days of Aristotle. Despite the use of this concept in numerous subjects, there is no consensus on the definition of causality and its possible mathematization. Many authors have analyzed the relation between causes and effects; the predominant school of thought reduces causation to a physical relation (either deterministic or probabilistic) between two events. The distinction between causes and consequences is not always clear and meaningful as different “layers of understanding” may be applied to the notion of causality. From this point of view the cause-effect implication relation can …