The notion of proportionality was introduced into the philosophical literature by Yablo 1992. To use one of his examples, consider a pigeon, Sophie, who has been trained to peck at red and only red targets. Suppose Sophie is presented with a scarlet target and pecks. Contrast the following two claims (1) …
In the previous post I claimed that assumptions about invariance play a substantial role in causal judgment and reasoning. In this post I focus on some experimental and theoretical work by psychologists illustrating this. In that literature it is a very common practice to ask subjects to make graded judgments about …
A previous post mentioned the notion of distinctions within causation (or among causal claims). The general idea is that a relationship can satisfy a minimal “interventionist” condition for causation (in the sense that X can be related to Y in such a way that some interventions on X are associated with a change …
As explained in the previous post, one very rich area of inquiry concerns the extent to which normative theories of causal reasoning, from both philosophy and elsewhere, successfully characterize how, as an empirical matter, various sorts of subjects (adults, children, non-human animals) reason. This has been explored by psychologists and other researchers …
How should philosophers (and others) approach the topic of causation and causal reasoning? Causation with a Human Face (CHF) proposes an approach that brings together results from a number of different disciplines, both descriptive ( e.g., the empirical psychology of causal cognition) and normative (statistics, econometrics, machine learning, philosophy). The guiding idea is that causal …
