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The concept of circular causality should be discarded

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 August 2005

Bram Bakker*
Affiliation:
Informatics Institute, University of Amsterdam, 1098 SJ Amsterdam, The Netherlands http://www.science.uva.nl/~bram/

Abstract:

This commentary argues that one specific but central concept in Lewis's theory, circular causality, is fundamentally flawed and should be discarded – first, because it does not make theoretical sense, and, second, because it leads to problems in practice, such as confounding the interaction between different systems with the relationship between different levels of analysis of a single system.

Type
Open Peer Commentary
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2005

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