In Chapter 1 of Causation with a Human Face, James Woodward articulates the metaphilosophical outlook on causation that gives his book its title. He tells us that his aim is to articulate a normative theory about how human beings ought to engage in causal reasoning. However, he believes that when …
James Woodward’s Causation with a Human Face defends three methodological proposals: (I) The empirical study of causal reasoning can fruitfully inform the philosophical analysis of causation, and vice versa. (II) Philosophers should attend to distinctions among different kinds of causal relationship, and not just the distinction between causal and non-causal relationships. (III) …
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) …
“What must nature, including man, be like in order that science be possible at all? … What must the world be like in order that man may know it?”, the philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn (1962/2012, p. 172) asks in the final paragraph of his book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. …
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 …
One of Woodward’s most important contributions to the study of causation is his introduction of the notion of invariance across background conditions. Woodward’s ideas on this topic have had a major influence on experimental research in causal cognition (including on my own work), and I thought it might be helpful to do …
I am very pleased to contribute to this symposium on Causation with a Human Face (CHF). My commentary concerns chapter 6 of CHF, which uses the notion of invariance to shed light on various puzzle cases about causation. (See Jim’s post “Invariance and Distinctions Within Causation” for a summary of …
