“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 …
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 …
