Still, no philosopher has been able to give a convincingly general answer to the question “Which variables need to be included in the background set K and conditioned on?” The reason is obvious: confounding too is a causal concept and hence defies probabilistic formulation. In 1983, Nancy Cartwright broke this deadlock and enriched the description of the background context with a causal component. She proposed that we should condition on any factor that is “causally relevant” to the effect. By borrowing a concept from rung two of the Ladder of Causation, she essentially gave up on the idea of
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