Review of The Art of Causal Conjecture

However, he found his attention increasingly distracted by the possibilities provided by probability trees for understanding probability and causality--so much so, in fact, that instead of finishing the first book, he wrote a different one on this second topic. It is this second book that is the subject of this review, and it is easy to see why the power and breadth of the ideas seduced Shafer from his original purpose. (Do not despair, however, those three draft chapters have now also appeared, although without the others that were originally intended to accompany them, in Probabilistic Expert Systems, Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, 1996). The author describes The Art of Causal Conjecture as presenting "a new mathematical and philosophical foundation for probability" (p. This is a large claim.