查看文章

Although there exists no universally accepted definitions of causality, it is widely assumed that causal beliefs are essential for human comprehension. The notion of causality is inherent in the very nature of human cognition because knowledge about events implies, among other things, the belief that all events have causes (Noordman & Vonk, 1998). People frequently use rules to assess cause and effect and thus to interpret reality. These rules are applied both in the context of science and in daily life. The study of causality has attracted the attention of scholars and scien tists in such diverse fields as philosophy, psychology, linguistics, statistics, and various experimental disciplines. A formal definition or description of causality that would cover theories from the various disciplines would in corporate the causal cues of covariation, contiguity between cause and ef fect, and chronological order (Einhorn & Hogarth, 1986; Mackie, 1980; Salmon, 1998). More recently, in different domains such as physics, psy chology, or biology, there has been a multidisciplinary debate that inquires how many innate causal modules humans have (Sperber, Premack, & Premack, 1995). Sperber et al. claimed that the existence of cognition in