Time and Causality across the Sciences

Samantha Kleinberg

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781108476676
• eBook ISBN: 9781108754927
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Databases
• Index: Computer Science

This book, geared toward academic researchers and graduate students, brings together research on all facets of how time and causality relate across the sciences. Time is fundamental to how we perceive and reason about causes. It lets us immediately rule out the sound of a car crash as its cause. That a cause happens before its effect has been a core, and often unquestioned, part of how we describe causality. Research across disciplines shows that the relationship is much more complex than that. This book explores what that means for both the metaphysics and epistemology of causes - what they are and how we can find them. Across psychology, biology, and the social sciences, common themes emerge, suggesting that time plays a critical role in our understanding. The increasing availability of large time series datasets allows us to ask new questions about causality, necessitating new methods for modeling dynamic systems and incorporating mechanistic information into causal models.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title
• Title page
• Copyright information
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• 1 An Introduction to Time and Causality
• 2 Causality and Time: An Introductory Typology
• 3 The Direction of Causation
• 4 On the Causal Nature of Time
• 5 Causation in a Physical World: An Overview of Our Emerging Understanding
• 6 Intervening in Time
• 7 Time–Event Relationships as Representations for Constructing Cell Mechanisms
• 8 Causation, Time Asymmetry, and Causal Mechanisms in the Social Sciences
• 9 Temporalization in Causal Modeling
• 10 Reintroducing Dynamics into Static Causal Models
• 11 Overcoming the Poverty of Mechanism in Causal Models
• References
• Index