Clark Glymour
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 307489 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Clark Glymour |
| NOMBRES | Clark |
| APELLIDO | Glymour |
| FIRMA | GLYMOUR C |
| AFILIACIONES | Carnegie Mellon University |
| VERIFICADO | No |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 53 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 165 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 52 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 1 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 1970 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2019 |
| ÍNDICE H | 7 |
The Enhanced Warfighter
Clark Glymour’s responses to the contributions to the Synthese special issue “Causation, probability, and truth
Reverse Inference in Neuropsychology
Reverse inference in cognitive neuropsychology has been characterized as inference to ‘psychological processes’ from ‘patterns of activation’ revealed by functional magnetic resonance or other scanning techniques. Several arguments have been provided against the possibility. Focusing on Machery’s ([2014]) presentation, we attempt to clarify the issues, rebut the impossibility arguments, and propose and illustrate a strategy for reverse inference.…
What Is Going on Inside the Arrows? Discovering the Hidden Springs in Causal Models
Using Gebharter’s representation, we consider aspects of the problem of discovering the structure of unmeasured submechanisms when the variables in those submechanisms have not been measured. Exploiting an early insight of Sober’s, we provide a correct algorithm for identifying latent, endogenous structure—submechanisms—for a restricted class of structures. The algorithm can be merged with other methods for discovering causal relations among unme…
Probability and the Explanatory Virtues
Recent literature in philosophy of science has addressed purported notions of explanatory virtues—‘explanatory power’, ‘unification’, and ‘coherence’. In each case, a probabilistic relation between a theory and data is said to measure the power of an explanation, or degree of unification, or degree of coherence. This essay argues that the measures do not capture cases that are paradigms of scientific explanation, that the available psychological …
Theoretical Equivalence and the Semantic View of Theories
Halvorson argues through a series of examples and a general result due to Myers that the “semantic view” of theories has no available account of formal theoretical equivalence. De Bouvere provides criteria overlooked in Halvorson’s paper that are immune to his counterexamples and to the theorem he cites. Those criteria accord with a modest version of the semantic view that rejects some of Van Fraassen’s apparent claims while retaining the core of…
What Language Dependence Problem? A Reply for Joyce to Fitelson on Joyce
In an essay recently published in this journal, Branden Fitelson argues that a variant of Miller's argument for the language dependence of the accuracy of predictions can be applied to Joyce's notion of accuracy of credences formulated in terms of scoring rules, resulting in a general potential problem for Joyce's argument for probabilism. We argue that no relevant problem of the sort Fitelson supposes arises since his main theorem and his suppor…
Galileo in Pittsburgh
Actual causation
What Is Right with ‘Bayes Net Methods’ and What Is Wrong with ‘Hunting Causes and Using Them’
Nancy Cartwright's recent criticisms of efforts and methods to obtain causal information from sample data using automated search are considered. In addition to reviewing that effort, I argue that almost all of her criticisms are false and rest on misreading, overgeneralization, or neglect of the relevant literature. 1. Introduction 2. Cartwright's Claims, and Their Errors 3. Problems of Causal Inference 4. Context 5. Graphical Causal Models and M…
Jon Williamson Bayesian Nets and Causality
Watching Social Science
The evidence that exposure to media violence causes later aggression derives largely from observational (nonexperimental) studies augmented by short-term experimental studies. The authors review some of the difficulties in causal inference from observational, longitudinal data; examine the extent to which these seem relevant to the empirical work on exposure to televised violence published to date; and present a reanalysis of data from an especia…
When Is a Brain Like the Planet
Time series of macroscopic quantities that are aggregates of microscopic quantities, with unknown one-many relations between macroscopic and microscopic states, are common in applied sciences, from economics to climate studies. When such time series of macroscopic quantities are claimed to be causal, the causal relations postulated are representable by a directed acyclic graph and associated probability distribution—sometimes called a dynamical B…
A Theory of Causal Learning in Children
The authors outline a cognitive and computational account of causal learning in children. They propose that children use specialized cognitive systems that allow them to recover an accurate "causal map" of the world: an abstract, coherent, learned representation of the causal relations among events. This kind of knowledge can be perspicuously understood in terms of the formalism of directed graphical causal models, or Bayes nets. Children's causa…
The automation of discovery
Department of Philosophy technical report
Ceterus Paribus Laws
Confirmation and Chaos
Recently, Rueger and Sharp (1996) and Koperski (1998) have been concerned to show that certain procedural accounts of model confirmation are compromised by non-linear dynamics. We suggest that the issues raised are better approached by considering whether chaotic data analysis methods allow for reliable inference from data. We provide a framework and an example of this approach
Causation, Prediction, and Search
The authors address the assumptions and methods that allow us to turn observations into causal knowledge, and use even incomplete causal knowledge in planning and prediction to influence and control our environment. What assumptions and methods allow us to turn observations into causal knowledge, and how can even incomplete causal knowledge be used in planning and prediction to influence and control our environment? In this book Peter Spirtes, Cl…
Causal learning mechanisms in very young children
Three studies investigated whether young children make accurate causal inferences on the basis of patterns of variation and covariation. Children were presented with a new causal relation by means of a machine called the "blicket detector." Some objects, but not others, made the machine light up and play music. In the first 2 experiments, children were told that "blickets make the machine go" and were then asked to identify which objects were "bl…
The Mind's Arrows
Android Epistemology For Babies
A Mind is a Terrible Thing to Waste—Critical Notice
Jaegwon Kim's Mind in a Physical World is an argument about mental causation that provides both a metaphysical theory and a lucid commentary on contemporary philosophical views. While I strongly recommend Kim's book to anyone interested in the subject, my endorsement is not unconditional, because I cannot make the same recomendation of the subject itself. Considering arguments of Davidson, Putnam, Burge, Block, and Kim himself, I conclude that th…
Rabbit Hunting
The Tetrad Project
The statistical community has brought logical rigor and mathematical precision to the problem of using data to make inferences about a model's parameter values. The TETRAD project, and related work in computer science and statistics, aims to apply those standards to the problem of using data and background knowledge to make inferences about a model's specification. We begin by drawing the analogy between parameter estimation and model specificati…
Reply to Comments
We will respond to our commentators individually, but the order of our responses follows naturally from the issues they bring up. Judea Pearl describes SEM's unfortunate retreat from the clear causal semantics articulated by Sewall Wright (1921) and later by Haavelmo (1943) to the algebraic interpretation preferred more recently by econometricians. We agree with Pearl about the history and also the problem, namely that the algebraic interpretatio…
Causal learning mechanisms in very young children
Three studies investigated whether young children make accurate causal inferences on the basis of patterns of variation and covariation. Children were presented with a new causal relation by means of a machine called the "blicket detector." Some objects, but not others, made the machine light up and play music. In the first 2 experiments, children were told that "blickets make the machine go" and were then asked to identify which objects were "bl…
Conditioning and Intervening
We consider the dispute between causal decision theorists and evidential decision theorists over Newcomb-like problems. We introduce a framework relating causation and directed graphs developed by Spirtes et al. (1993) and evaluate several arguments in this context. We argue that much of the debate between the two camps is misplaced; the disputes turn on the distinction between conditioning on an event E as against conditioning on an event I whic…
Theoretical Equivalence and the Semantic View of Theories
Halvorson argues through a series of examples and a general result due to Myers that the “semantic view” of theories has no available account of formal theoretical equivalence. De Bouvere provides criteria overlooked in Halvorson’s paper that are immune to his counterexamples and to the theorem he cites. Those criteria accord with a modest version of the semantic view that rejects some of Van Fraassen’s apparent claims while retaining the core of…
An Algorithm for Fast Recovery of Sparse Causal Graphs
Previous asymptotically correct algorithms for recovering causal structure from sample probabilities have been limited even in sparse causal graphs to a few variables. We describe an asymptotically correct algorithm whose complexity for fixed graph connectivity increases polynomially in the number of vertices, and may in practice recover sparse graphs with several hundred variables. From sample data with n = 20,000, an implementation of the algor…
Actual causation
Probability and the Explanatory Virtues
Recent literature in philosophy of science has addressed purported notions of explanatory virtues—‘explanatory power’, ‘unification’, and ‘coherence’. In each case, a probabilistic relation between a theory and data is said to measure the power of an explanation, or degree of unification, or degree of coherence. This essay argues that the measures do not capture cases that are paradigms of scientific explanation, that the available psychological …
Revisions of Bootstrap Testing
Scientific arguments often attribute the credit or blame for particular experimental or observational results to fragments of theories rather than to the whole of them. The thesis of Theory and Evidence (Glymour 1980) is that there are structural criteria that account for at least part of the distribution of credit and blame; the book also attempts a tentative formal characterization of one structural criterion. David Christensen (1983) has produ…
Lost in the tensors
Rabbit Hunting
The gravitational red shift as a test of general relativity
Reverse Inference in Neuropsychology
Reverse inference in cognitive neuropsychology has been characterized as inference to ‘psychological processes’ from ‘patterns of activation’ revealed by functional magnetic resonance or other scanning techniques. Several arguments have been provided against the possibility. Focusing on Machery’s ([2014]) presentation, we attempt to clarify the issues, rebut the impossibility arguments, and propose and illustrate a strategy for reverse inference.…
What Is Going on Inside the Arrows? Discovering the Hidden Springs in Causal Models
Using Gebharter’s representation, we consider aspects of the problem of discovering the structure of unmeasured submechanisms when the variables in those submechanisms have not been measured. Exploiting an early insight of Sober’s, we provide a correct algorithm for identifying latent, endogenous structure—submechanisms—for a restricted class of structures. The algorithm can be merged with other methods for discovering causal relations among unme…
The Sum Rule is Well-Confirmed
Simon Kochen and Ernst Specker's well-known argument ([6]) against hidden variable theories for quantum mechanics is also an argument against the possibility of quantum systems having, simultaneously, precise values for all of the dynamical quantities associated with such systems. Devices for defeating the argument were in the literature even before its publication, but recently Arthur Fine has raised a new difficulty ([4]). Fine points out that …
On Some Patterns of Reduction
The notion of reduction in the natural sciences has been assimilated to the notion of inter-theoretical explanation. Many philosophers of science (following Nagel) have held that the apparently ontological issues involved in reduction should be replaced by analyses of the syntactic and semantic connections involved in explaining one theory on the basis of another. The replacement does not seem to have been especially successful, for we still lack…
When Is a Brain Like the Planet
Time series of macroscopic quantities that are aggregates of microscopic quantities, with unknown one-many relations between macroscopic and microscopic states, are common in applied sciences, from economics to climate studies. When such time series of macroscopic quantities are claimed to be causal, the causal relations postulated are representable by a directed acyclic graph and associated probability distribution—sometimes called a dynamical B…
The automation of discovery
Department of Philosophy technical report
On the Methods of Cognitive Neuropsychology
Contemporary cognitive neuropsychology attempts to infer unobserved features of normal human cognition, or ‘cognitive architecture’, from experiments with normals and with brain-damaged subjects in whom certain normal cognitive capacities are altered, diminished, or absent. Fundamental methodological issues about the enterprise of cognitive neuropsychology concern the characterization of methods by which features of normal cognitive architecture …
Conceptual scheming or confessions of a metaphysical realist
Physics by Convention
“It ain't nuthin' until I call it.” Bill Guthrie, Umpire Numerous criticisms of Adolf Grünbaum's account of conventions in physics have been published ([1], [2], [3], [4], [13]), and he has replied to most of them ([6], [8]). Nonetheless, there seem to me to be good reasons for offering further criticism. In the first place Grünbaum's philosophy seems to me at least partly an extrapolation of one aspect of the views on conventions developed by Re…
Clark Glymour’s responses to the contributions to the Synthese special issue “Causation, probability, and truth
What Is Right with ‘Bayes Net Methods’ and What Is Wrong with ‘Hunting Causes and Using Them’
Nancy Cartwright's recent criticisms of efforts and methods to obtain causal information from sample data using automated search are considered. In addition to reviewing that effort, I argue that almost all of her criticisms are false and rest on misreading, overgeneralization, or neglect of the relevant literature. 1. Introduction 2. Cartwright's Claims, and Their Errors 3. Problems of Causal Inference 4. Context 5. Graphical Causal Models and M…
What Went Wrong? Reflections on Science by Observation and The Bell Curve
The Bell Curve aims to establish a set of causal claims. I argue that the methodology of The Bell Curve is typical of much of contemporary social science and is intrinsically defective. I claim better methods are available for causal inference from observational data, but that those methods would yield no causal conclusions from the data used in the formal analyses in The Bell Curve. Against the laissez-faire social policies advocated in the book…
Two Flagpoles are More Paradoxical than One
The relation that holds between two singular sentences just if one of them can figure in an acceptable deductive nomological ( DN ) explanation of the other is not symmetric. As Sylvain Bromberger ([1]) pointed out some years ago, a sentence giving the height of a flagpole can figure in a DN explanation of a sentence specifying the length of the flagpole's shadow, but interchanging the explanans and the explanandum does not result in an explanati…
Topology, cosmology and convention
Watching Social Science
The evidence that exposure to media violence causes later aggression derives largely from observational (nonexperimental) studies augmented by short-term experimental studies. The authors review some of the difficulties in causal inference from observational, longitudinal data; examine the extent to which these seem relevant to the empirical work on exposure to televised violence published to date; and present a reanalysis of data from an especia…
On Some Patterns of Reduction
The notion of reduction in the natural sciences has been assimilated to the notion of inter-theoretical explanation. Many philosophers of science (following Nagel) have held that the apparently ontological issues involved in reduction should be replaced by analyses of the syntactic and semantic connections involved in explaining one theory on the basis of another. The replacement does not seem to have been especially successful, for we still lack…
Topology, cosmology and convention
Physics by Convention
“It ain't nuthin' until I call it.” Bill Guthrie, Umpire Numerous criticisms of Adolf Grünbaum's account of conventions in physics have been published ([1], [2], [3], [4], [13]), and he has replied to most of them ([6], [8]). Nonetheless, there seem to me to be good reasons for offering further criticism. In the first place Grünbaum's philosophy seems to me at least partly an extrapolation of one aspect of the views on conventions developed by Re…
Topology, Cosmology and Convention
To Save the Noumena
Reichenbach's entanglements
The Sum Rule is Well-Confirmed
Simon Kochen and Ernst Specker's well-known argument ([6]) against hidden variable theories for quantum mechanics is also an argument against the possibility of quantum systems having, simultaneously, precise values for all of the dynamical quantities associated with such systems. Devices for defeating the argument were in the literature even before its publication, but recently Arthur Fine has raised a new difficulty ([4]). Fine points out that …
Lost in the tensors
Two Flagpoles are More Paradoxical than One
The relation that holds between two singular sentences just if one of them can figure in an acceptable deductive nomological ( DN ) explanation of the other is not symmetric. As Sylvain Bromberger ([1]) pointed out some years ago, a sentence giving the height of a flagpole can figure in a DN explanation of a sentence specifying the length of the flagpole's shadow, but interchanging the explanans and the explanandum does not result in an explanati…
The gravitational red shift as a test of general relativity
Foundations of Space-Time Theories
Conceptual scheming or confessions of a metaphysical realist
Space-Time and Synonymy
In “The Epistemology of Geometry” Glymour proposed a necessary structural condition for the synonymy of two space-time theories. David Zaret has recently challenged this proposal, by arguing that Newtonian gravitational theory with a flat, non-dynamic connection (FNGT) is intuitively synonymous with versions of the theory using a curved dynamical connection (CNGT), even though these two theories fail to satisfy Glymour's proposed necessary condit…
Theory and Evidence
Revisions of Bootstrap Testing
Scientific arguments often attribute the credit or blame for particular experimental or observational results to fragments of theories rather than to the whole of them. The thesis of Theory and Evidence (Glymour 1980) is that there are structural criteria that account for at least part of the distribution of credit and blame; the book also attempts a tentative formal characterization of one structural criterion. David Christensen (1983) has produ…
Causal modeling with the Tetrad program
Tetrad
Exploring Causal Structure with the Tetrad Program
Department of Philosophy technical report
Convergence to the Truth and Nothing but the Truth
One construal of convergent realism is that for each clear question, scientific inquiry eventually answers it. In this paper we adapt the techniques of formal learning theory to determine in a precise manner the circumstances under which this ideal is achievable. In particular, we define two criteria of convergence to the truth on the basis of evidence. The first, which we call EA convergence, demands that the theorist converge to the complete tr…
Reply to Comments
Simulation Studies of the Reliability of Computer-Aided Model Specification Using the Tetrad II, EQS, and Lisrel Programs
TETRAD II, a fully automated successor to the TETRAD program, is intended to aid in the respecification of underspecified linear causal models, or structural equation models. The performance of TETRAD II is compared with the automatic respecification procedures in the EQS and LISREL VI programs using 360 simulated data sets from nine different linear models containing 'latent' or unmeasured variables. LISREL VI and EQS each output a single sugges…
An Algorithm for Fast Recovery of Sparse Causal Graphs
Previous asymptotically correct algorithms for recovering causal structure from sample probabilities have been limited even in sparse causal graphs to a few variables. We describe an asymptotically correct algorithm whose complexity for fixed graph connectivity increases polynomially in the number of vertices, and may in practice recover sparse graphs with several hundred variables. From sample data with n = 20,000, an implementation of the algor…
Causation, Prediction, and Search
On the Methods of Cognitive Neuropsychology
Contemporary cognitive neuropsychology attempts to infer unobserved features of normal human cognition, or ‘cognitive architecture’, from experiments with normals and with brain-damaged subjects in whom certain normal cognitive capacities are altered, diminished, or absent. Fundamental methodological issues about the enterprise of cognitive neuropsychology concern the characterization of methods by which features of normal cognitive architecture …
Conditioning and Intervening
We consider the dispute between causal decision theorists and evidential decision theorists over Newcomb-like problems. We introduce a framework relating causation and directed graphs developed by Spirtes et al. (1993) and evaluate several arguments in this context. We argue that much of the debate between the two camps is misplaced; the disputes turn on the distinction between conditioning on an event E as against conditioning on an event I whic…
Epistemology (34 obras) · Philosophy (34 obras) · Computer Science (32 obras) · Mathematics (26 obras) · Psychology (17 obras) · Bayesian Modeling and Causal Inference (15 obras) · Philosophy and History of Science (15 obras) · Statistics (12 obras) · Philosophy of science (11 obras) · Artificial Intelligence (10 obras)