Philosophy 12: Introduction to Causal Reasoning

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Announcements

The final exam will be on Tuesday, June 12th, at 11:30. It will meet in the same room where class was held. You may bring, if you wish, a calculator to the final. Students are required to bring blue books and a Scantron (form 20788).

Lecture notes

• Lecture 1: Event Causation
• Lecture 2: Variable Causation
• Lecture 3: Indeterministic Causation
• Lecture 4: Causal Graphs
• Lecture 5: Interventions
• Lecture 6: Relative Frequency
• Lecture 7: Conditional Relative Frequency
• Lecture 8: Independence and Association
• Lecture 9: Conditional Independence
• Lecture 10: Causation vs. Association
• Lecture 11: Causation to Unconditional Association
• Lecture 12: Causation to Conditional Association
• Lecture 13: Causation to Association III: D-separation
• Lecture 14: Problems with Causal Discovery
• Lecture 15: Confounding
• Lecture 16: Experiments

Exercises

Below are some exercises for the above lectures. These exercises will not be graded as they are provided merely as a study aid. However, if you have any questions as to why a particular answer was given, please contact your TA.

• Lecture 1: Event Causation (problems) (answer key)
• Lecture 2: Variable Causation (problems) (answer key)
• Lecture 3: Deterministic and Indeterministic Causation (problems) (answer key)
• Lecture 4: Causal Graphs (problems) (answer key)
• Lecture 5: Interventions (problems) (answer key)
• Lecture 6: Relative Frequency (problems) (answer key)
• Lecture 7: Conditional Relative Frequency (problems) (answer key)
• Lecture 8: Independence (problems) (answer key)
• Lecture 9: Conditional Independence (problems) (answer key)
• Lecture 10: Causation vs. Association (problems) (answer key)
• Lecture 11: Causation to Unconditional Association(problems) (answer key)
• Lecture 12: Causation to Conditional Association (problems) (answer key)
• Lecture 14: Problems with Causal Discovery (problems) (answer key)
• Lecture 15: Confounding (problems) (answer key)
• Lecture 16: Experiments (problems) (answer key)

Study Guides

Essentially everything we've covered in the course is fair game for the final (except for the counterfactual theory of causation and Mackie's INUS theory of causation, which will not be covered). The following study guide, although intended to be helpful in preparing for the final, should not be considered strictly representative of the kinds of questions included on the final.

• Study questions for the final (answer key)

Midterms

• First midterm
• Second midterm

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