Causal reasoning is one of our most central cognitive competencies, enabling us to adapt to our world. Causal knowledge allows us to predict future events, or diagnose the causes of observed facts. We plan actions and solve problems using knowledge about cause-effect relations. Although causal reasoning is a component of most of our cognitive functions, it has been neglected in cognitive psychology for many decades. The Oxford Handbook of Causal Reasoning offers a state-of-the-art review of the growing field, and its contribution to the world of cognitive science. The Handbook begins with an introduction of competing theories of causal learning and reasoning. In the next section, it presents research about basic cognitive functions involved in causal cognition, such as perception, categorization, argumentation, decision-making, and induction. The following section examines research on domains that embody causal relations, including intuitive physics, legal and moral reasoning, psychopathology, language, social cognition, and the roles of space and time. The final section presents research from neighboring fields that study developmental, phylogenetic, and cultural differences in causal cognition. The chapters, each written by renowned researchers in their field, fill in the gaps of many cognitive psychology textbooks, emphasizing the crucial role of causal structures in our everyday lives. This Handbook is an essential read for students and researchers of the cognitive sciences, including cognitive, developmental, social, comparative, and cross-cultural psychology; philosophy; methodology; statistics; artificial intelligence; and machine learning.

Causation is a central topic in many areas of philosophy. In metaphysics, philosophers want to know what causation is, and how it is related to laws of nature, probability, action, and freedom of the will. In epistemology, philosophers investigate how causal claims can be inferred from statistical data, and how causation is related to perception, knowledge and explanation. In the philosophy of mind, philosophers want to know whether and how the mind can be said to have causal efficacy, and in ethics, whether there is a moral distinction between acts and omissions and whether the moral value of an act can be judged according to its consequences. And causation is a contested concept in other fields of enquiry, such as biology, physics, and the law. This book provides an in-depth and comprehensive overview of these and other topics, as well as the history of the causation debate from the ancient Greeks to the logical empiricists. The chapters provide surveys of contemporary debates, while often also advancing novel and controversial claims; and each includes a comprehensive bibliography and suggestions for further reading. The book is thus the most comprehensive source of information about causation currently available, and will be invaluable for upper-level undergraduates through to professional philosophers.

The Oxford Handbook of Thinking and Reasoning brings together the contributions of many of the leading researchers in thinking and reasoning to create the most comprehensive overview of research on thinking and reasoning that has ever been available.

The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Science emphasizes the research and theory most central to modern cognitive science: computational theories of complex human cognition. Additional facets of cognitive science are discussed in the handbook's introductory chapter.

The past few decades have seen an explosion of research on causal reasoning in philosophy, computer science, and statistics, as well as descriptive research in psychology about how people reason about causes. Causation with a Human Face integrates these lines of research and argues for an understanding of how each can inform the other: normative ideas can suggest interesting experiments, while descriptive results can suggest important normative concepts. Woodward's overall framework builds on an interventionist treatment of causation, and discusses proposals about the role of invariant or stable relationships in successful causal reasoning and the notion of proportionality. He argues that these normative ideas are reflected in the causal judgments that people actually make as a descriptive matter.

A general formal theory of causal reasoning as a logical study of causal models, reasoning, and inference. In this book, Alexander Bochman presents a general formal theory of causal reasoning as a logical study of causal models, reasoning, and inference, basing it on a supposition that causal reasoning is not a competitor of logical reasoning but its complement for situations lacking logically sufficient data or knowledge. Bochman also explores the relationship of this theory with the popular structural equation approach to causality proposed by Judea Pearl and explores several applications ranging from artificial intelligence to legal theory, including abduction, counterfactuals, actual and proximate causality, dynamic causal models, and reasoning about action and change in artificial intelligence. As logical preparation, before introducing causal concepts, Bochman describes an alternative, situation-based semantics for classical logic that provides a better understanding of what can be captured by purely logical means. He then presents another prerequisite, outlining those parts of a general theory of nonmonotonic reasoning that are relevant to his own theory. These two components provide a logical background for the main, two-tier formalism of the causal calculus that serves as the formal basis of his theory. He presents the main causal formalism of the book as a natural generalization of classical logic that allows for causal reasoning. This provides a formal background for subsequent chapters. Finally, Bochman presents a generalization of causal reasoning to dynamic domains.

A guide to current work on free will and related subjects, the focus is on writings of the past 40 years, in which there has been a resurgence of interest in traditional issues about the freedom of the will in the light of new developments in the sciences, philosophy and humanistic studies.

This is a comprehensive reference work that provides an exhaustive guide to scholarship on the perennial problem of free will.