ABSTRACT
Nancy Cartwright believes that we live in a Dappled World-a world in which theories, principles, and methods applicable in one domain may be inapplicable in others and in which there are no universal principles. One of the targets of Cartwright’s arguments for this conclusion is the Causal Markov condition, a condition which has been proposed as a universal condition on causal structures.2 The Causal Markov condition, Cartwright argues, is applicable only in a limited domain of special cases and thus cannot be used as a universal principle in causal discovery. I have no dispute with any of these claims here. Rather, I wish to argue for a very limited thesis: that the Causal Markov condition is applicable in the specific domain of microscopic quantum mechanical systems; further, that the condition can fruitfully be applied to the much discussed EPR setup. This is perhaps a surprising conclusion, for it is precisely in this domain that Cartwright’s arguments against the Causal Markov condition have been considered to be the most successful.
