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Published on: September 19, 2012
Counterfactuals, graphical causal models and potential outcomes: response to Lindquist and Sobel
1Department of Philosophy, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 15213, Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, Pensacola, Florida, 32507, USA. cg09@andrew.cmu.edu
Abstract:
Lindquist and Sobel claim that the graphical causal models they call "agnostic" do not imply any counterfactual conditionals. They doubt that "causal effects" can be discovered using graphical causal models typical of SEMs, DCMs, Bayes nets, Granger causal models, etc. Each of these claims is false or exaggerated. They recommend instead that investigators adopt the "potential outcomes" framework. The potential outcomes framework is an obstacle rather than an aid to discovering causal relations in fMRI contexts.
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