Interventionist Counterfactuals on Causal Teams

Abstract

We introduce an extension of team semantics which provides a framework for the logic of manipulationist theories of causation based on structural equation models, such as Woodward's and Pearl's; our causal teams incorporate (partial or total) information about functional dependencies that are invariant under interventions. We give a unified treatment of observational and causal aspects of causal models by isolating two operators on causal teams which correspond, respectively, to conditioning and to interventionist counterfactual implication. We then introduce formal languages for deterministic and probabilistic causal discourse, and show how various notions of cause (e.g. direct and total causes) may be defined in them. Through the tuning of various constraints on structural equations (recursivity, existence and uniqueness of solutions, full or partial definition of the functions), our framework can capture different causal models. We give an overview of the inferential aspects of the recursive, fully defined case; and we dedicate some attention to the recursive, partially defined case, which involves a shift of attention towards nonclassical truth values.