The Principle of Common Cause

The Common cause principle says that every correlation is either due to a direct causal effect linking the correlated entities, or is brought about by a third factor, a so-called common cause. The principle is of centralimportance in the philosophy of science, especially in causal explanation, causal modeling, and in the foundations of quantum physics.
Written for philosophersof science, physicists, and statisticians, this book contribute to the debate over the validity of the Common Cause Principle, by proving results that bring to the surface the nature of explanation by common causes. It provides a technical and mathematically rigorous examination of the notion of common cause, providing an analysis not only in terms of classical probability measure spaces, which is tyical in the available literature, but also in quantum probability theory. The authors provide numerous open problems to futher the debate and encourage future research in this field.