Causes and explanations: a structural-model approach-part II: explanations

  • Authors:
  • Joseph Y. Halpern;Judea Pearl

  • Affiliations:
  • Cornell University, Dept. of Computer Science, Ithaca, NY;Dept. of Computer Science, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA

  • Venue:
  • IJCAI'01 Proceedings of the 17th international joint conference on Artificial intelligence - Volume 1
  • Year:
  • 2001

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Abstract

We propose a new definition of (causal) explanation, using structural equations to model counterfactuals. The definition is based on the notion of actual cause, as defined and motivated in a companion paper. Essentially, an explanation is a fact that is not known for certain but, if found to be true, would constitute an actual cause of the fact to be explained, regardless of the agent's initial uncertainty. We show that the definition handles well a number of problematic examples from the literature.