Non-Markovian Causality in the Social Sciences with Some Theorems on Transitivity

Abstract

When we consider familiar observable properties of a physical object we postulate almost without thinking that these properties are determined by the particular atomic structure of the object at the moment of observation. If we know the current atomic structure we firmly believe that it is not necessary to know anything about the history of the object. It may well be that in many practical instances this assumption is a theoretical one that we cannot put into practice, but it is a deep and important theoretical assumption about the Markovian character of the physical world. It is a standard theoretical move in physics to postulate a concept of state such that if we know the state of a system at a given time we need know nothing about the system at any earlier time in order to analyze and predict its future behavior. This radical Markovian truncation of the past is one of the most essential general concepts in the physical sciences.