Thanks for the link, I've started reading it. The complexity of defining and determining "actual causality" is a good justification for mathematicians' avoidin

Thanks for the link, I've started reading it. The complexity of defining and determining "actual causality" is a good justification for mathematicians' avoiding the whole thing and using material implication instead. As most of you already know, material implication A -> B ("A implies B") is a boolean operation, which is the same as ((not A) OR B), see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Material_implication_(rule_of_inference) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Material_implication_(rule_of_... . Material implication avoids all this complexity.. but because it's simpler, it cannot by itself represent our notions of causality. Material implication even has some "weird" surprises, e.g., "All Martians are green" and "All Martians are not green" are both true when defined using material implication. I created an "allsome" quantifier to deal with this problem: https://dwheeler.com/essays/allsome.html https://dwheeler.com/essays/allsome.html . But it'd be nice to learn about other alternatives, so I started reading this. I've only started reading this book, but the approach does seem a little odd. Its definition of causality embeds a model, which has embedded causality in it. In section 2.1 https://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/halpern/papers/causalitybook-ch1-3.html#head2.2 https://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/halpern/papers/causalitybook... it notes this issue: "It may seem somewhat circular to use causal models, which clearly already encode causal relationships, to define causality. There is some validity to this concern... Nevertheless, I would claim that this definition is useful." I don't have a better idea, and I can see the value in making the use of models clear. But it does seem to weaken the idea of defining causality. Is this considered reasonable? Is there a possibly better approach?