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    LoyalLoyalJusticeJustice
    Made withinDC&Austin
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    Perspectives
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    42
    Home/Original/inverse
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    Inverse View

    It is not the case that Events A and B that occur in almost completely overlapping spatial regions will be correlated, and a common cause may not screen them off

    ?Set your confidence on the premises below to see your aggregate.

    Reasons For

    2 perspectives
    Reason for 1 of 2
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    • 1.Reichenbach's Common Cause Principle presupposes a well-defined event ontology where causes and effects occupy distinct, separable spacetime regions.
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    • 2.When spatial regions almost completely overlap, the events they host may lack the independence required for screening-off to be a coherent probabilistic relation.
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    • 3.A principle cannot be violated by cases that fall outside the scope of its well-formed application conditions, so near-total overlap dissolves rather than refutes the screening-off requirement.
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    Reason for 2 of 2
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    • 1.Cartwright and Arntzenius have argued that apparent screening-off failures in overlapping regions reflect improper coarse-graining of the underlying causal structure, not genuine counterexamples.
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    • 2.If a sufficiently fine-grained common cause variable is specified—one that captures the shared physical process within the overlapping region—screening off is restored in principle.
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    • 3.Failures of screening-off in the cited cases therefore indict the choice of causal variables rather than the Common Cause Principle itself.
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    Reasons Against

    1 perspective
    Reason against
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    • 1.If two spatial regions A and B almost completely overlap but neither contains the other, the corresponding events are correlated
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    • 2.A common cause that precedes both events may fail to screen off the correlation between events in heavily overlapping regions
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    Strongest counterpoint
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