赖欣巴赫共因原理的哲学辨析

The Philosophical Status of Reichenbach's Common Cause Principle

追问事件因果性与事件相关性之间的关系,这一直是当代因果论、物理学哲学和统计学哲学的一个核心论题。大多哲学家认为,赖欣巴赫的共因原理与因果马尔科夫条件不是普遍有效的,它们具有同样的局限性,尽管后者比前者更具一般性。针对这些争议,布达佩斯学派坚持回归本源。他们相信,在共因不完备的概率空间拓展中,总能发现事件相关的共因。问题是,他们的整个纲领目前还只是一种形式化理论,其结论在很多情形下是本体论惰性的,不能充分保证事件相关之共因存在的实在性。

“No correlation without causation.”To clarify the nature of this slogan has been one of the central themes in the contemporary theory of causation and in the philosophy of physics and statistics during the past sixty years.There seems to be consensus among many philosophers that neither Reichenbach s common cause principle nor the causal Markov condition are universally valid,and that they indeed have the same limiting property,even if the latter is far more general than the former.The Budapest school returns to Reichenbach s original position and believes that,from an extension of the common cause s incomplete probability space,it is always possible to provide a Reichenbachian common cause for any given correlation.However,this approach also faces a fundamental problem:clearly,the whole program is at present merely a formal setup,and in many cases its results are ontologically inert and cannot sufficiently warrant the reality of any putative common cause for any correlation.