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Alternative Approaches To Causation
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Book Synopsis Alternative Approaches to Causation by : Yafeng Shan
Download or read book Alternative Approaches to Causation written by Yafeng Shan and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2024-01-09 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Causation is one of the most controversial topics in philosophy. There is a wide range of philosophical accounts of causation, for example, the regularity account, the probabilistic account, the counterfactual account, the interventionist account, which can be all classified as 'difference-making' accounts; and the mechanistic account. Many argue that only one of these accounts is correct as there is only one type of causal relation (causal monism), while others maintain that there are multiple types of causation (causal pluralism). In addition, there are eliminativists argue that science has no need of causation at all, while primitivists maintain that causation is unanalysable. Recently, the difference-making and mechanistic approaches have dominated recent philosophical discussion of causation. Other approaches and positions have been insufficiently discussed and assessed, especially in the context of philosophy of science. This volume explores and examines alternative approaches to causation. It revisits causal primitivism and causal eliminativism in the context of recent literature. It further explores the pluralistic approach, the fictionalist approach, the inferentialist approach, and the informational approach. It also examines the application of the dispositional approach, the epistemic approach, and the powerful particulars approach to the natural and social sciences. Overall, the volume is complementary to the recent discussion on the difference-making and mechanistic approaches and sheds new light on the metaphysical, epistemological, conceptual and methodological issues on causation. As such, it provides foundations for further research and teaching of this hotly debated topic.
Book Synopsis Causation in Science and the Methods of Scientific Discovery by : Rani Lill Anjum
Download or read book Causation in Science and the Methods of Scientific Discovery written by Rani Lill Anjum and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2018-10-18 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Causation is the main foundation upon which the possibility of science rests. Without causation, there would be no scientific understanding, explanation, prediction, nor application in new technologies. How we discover causal connections is no easy matter, however. Causation often lies hiddenfrom view and it is vital that we adopt the right methods for uncovering it. The choice of methods will inevitably reflect what one takes causation to be, making an accurate account of causation an even more pressing matter. This enquiry informs the correct norms for an empirical study of the world. In Causation in Science and the Methods of Scientific Discovery, Rani Lill Anjum and Stephen Mumford propose nine new norms of scientific discovery. A number of existing methodological and philosophical orthodoxies are challenged as they argue that progress in science is being held back by an overlysimplistic philosophy of causation.
Book Synopsis The Oxford Handbook of Causation by : Helen Beebee
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Causation written by Helen Beebee and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2012-01-12 with total page 816 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Causation is a central topic in many areas of philosophy. In metaphysics, philosophers want to know what causation is, and how it is related to laws of nature, probability, action, and freedom of the will. In epistemology, philosophers investigate how causal claims can be inferred from statistical data, and how causation is related to perception, knowledge and explanation. In the philosophy of mind, philosophers want to know whether and how the mind can be said to have causal efficacy, and in ethics, whether there is a moral distinction between acts and omissions and whether the moral value of an act can be judged according to its consequences. And causation is a contested concept in other fields of enquiry, such as biology, physics, and the law. This book provides an in-depth and comprehensive overview of these and other topics, as well as the history of the causation debate from the ancient Greeks to the logical empiricists. The chapters provide surveys of contemporary debates, while often also advancing novel and controversial claims; and each includes a comprehensive bibliography and suggestions for further reading. The book is thus the most comprehensive source of information about causation currently available, and will be invaluable for upper-level undergraduates through to professional philosophers.
Book Synopsis Causation and Explanation by : Stathis Psillos
Download or read book Causation and Explanation written by Stathis Psillos and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-12-18 with total page 443 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is the nature of causation? How is causation linked with explanation? And can there be an adequate theory of explanation? These questions and many others are addressed in this unified and rigorous examination of the philosophical problems surrounding causation, laws and explanation. Part 1 of this book explores Hume's views on causation, theories of singular causation, and counterfactual and mechanistic approaches. Part 2 considers the regularity view of laws and laws as relations among universals, as well as recent alternative approaches to laws. Part 3 examines the issues arising from deductive-nomological explanation, statistical explanation, the explanation of laws and the metaphysics of explanation. Accessible to readers of all levels, this book provides an excellent introduction to one of the most enduring problems of philosophy.
Book Synopsis Making Things Happen by : James Woodward
Download or read book Making Things Happen written by James Woodward and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2005-10-27 with total page 419 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Making Things Happen, James Woodward develops a new and ambitious comprehensive theory of causation and explanation that draws on literature from a variety of disciplines and which applies to a wide variety of claims in science and everyday life. His theory is a manipulationist account, proposing that causal and explanatory relationships are relationships that are potentially exploitable for purposes of manipulation and control. This account has its roots in the commonsense idea that causes are means for bringing about effects; but it also draws on a long tradition of work in experimental design, econometrics, and statistics. Woodward shows how these ideas may be generalized to other areas of science from the social scientific and biomedical contexts for which they were originally designed. He also provides philosophical foundations for the manipulationist approach, drawing out its implications, comparing it with alternative approaches, and defending it from common criticisms. In doing so, he shows how the manipulationist account both illuminates important features of successful causal explanation in the natural and social sciences, and avoids the counterexamples and difficulties that infect alternative approaches, from the deductive-nomological model onwards. Making Things Happen will interest philosophers working in the philosophy of science, the philosophy of social science, and metaphysics, and as well as anyone interested in causation, explanation, and scientific methodology.
Book Synopsis Causation and Counterfactuals by : John Collins
Download or read book Causation and Counterfactuals written by John Collins and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2004-06-25 with total page 500 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One philosophical approach to causation sees counterfactual dependence as the key to the explanation of causal facts: for example, events c (the cause) and e (the effect) both occur, but had c not occurred, e would not have occurred either. The counterfactual analysis of causation became a focus of philosophical debate after the 1973 publication of the late David Lewis's groundbreaking paper, "Causation," which argues against the previously accepted "regularity" analysis and in favor of what he called the "promising alternative" of the counterfactual analysis. Thirty years after Lewis's paper, this book brings together some of the most important recent work connecting—or, in some cases, disputing the connection between—counterfactuals and causation, including the complete version of Lewis's Whitehead lectures, "Causation as Influence," a major reworking of his original paper. Also included is a more recent essay by Lewis, "Void and Object," on causation by omission. Several of the essays first appeared in a special issue of the Journal of Philosophy, but most, including the unabridged version of "Causation as Influence," are published for the first time or in updated forms. Other topics considered include the "trumping" of one event over another in determining causation; de facto dependence; challenges to the transitivity of causation; the possibility that entities other than events are the fundamental causal relata; the distinction between dependence and production in accounts of causation; the distinction between causation and causal explanation; the context-dependence of causation; probabilistic analyses of causation; and a singularist theory of causation.
Download or read book Causal Models written by Steven Sloman and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2005-07-28 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Human beings are active agents who can think. To understand how thought serves action requires understanding how people conceive of the relation between cause and effect, between action and outcome. In cognitive terms, how do people construct and reason with the causal models we use to represent our world? A revolution is occurring in how statisticians, philosophers, and computer scientists answer this question. Those fields have ushered in new insights about causal models by thinking about how to represent causal structure mathematically, in a framework that uses graphs and probability theory to develop what are called causal Bayesian networks. The framework starts with the idea that the purpose of causal structure is to understand and predict the effects of intervention. How does intervening on one thing affect other things? This is not a question merely about probability (or logic), but about action. The framework offers a new understanding of mind: Thought is about the effects of intervention and cognition is thus intimately tied to actions that take place either in the actual physical world or in imagination, in counterfactual worlds. The book offers a conceptual introduction to the key mathematical ideas, presenting them in a non-technical way, focusing on the intuitions rather than the theorems. It tries to show why the ideas are important to understanding how people explain things and why thinking not only about the world as it is but the world as it could be is so central to human action. The book reviews the role of causality, causal models, and intervention in the basic human cognitive functions: decision making, reasoning, judgment, categorization, inductive inference, language, and learning. In short, the book offers a discussion about how people think, talk, learn, and explain things in causal terms, in terms of action and manipulation.
Book Synopsis Unlocking Divine Action by : Michael J. Dodds
Download or read book Unlocking Divine Action written by Michael J. Dodds and published by CUA Press. This book was released on 2012-09-26 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Provides a sustained account of how the thought of Aquinas may be used in conjunction with contemporary science to deepen our understanding of divine action and address such issues as creation, providence, prayer, and miracles.
Download or read book Causation written by L. A. Paul and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2013-05-09 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Causation is at once familiar and mysterious—we can detect its presence in the world, but we cannot agree on the metaphysics of the causal relation. L. A. Paul and Ned Hall guide the reader through the most important philosophical treatments of causation, and develop a broad and sophisticated understanding of the issues under debate.
Book Synopsis Actual Causality by : Joseph Y. Halpern
Download or read book Actual Causality written by Joseph Y. Halpern and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2019-02-19 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new approach for defining causality and such related notions as degree of responsibility, degrees of blame, and causal explanation. Causality plays a central role in the way people structure the world; we constantly seek causal explanations for our observations. But what does it even mean that an event C “actually caused” event E? The problem of defining actual causation goes beyond mere philosophical speculation. For example, in many legal arguments, it is precisely what needs to be established in order to determine responsibility. The philosophy literature has been struggling with the problem of defining causality since Hume. In this book, Joseph Halpern explores actual causality, and such related notions as degree of responsibility, degree of blame, and causal explanation. The goal is to arrive at a definition of causality that matches our natural language usage and is helpful, for example, to a jury deciding a legal case, a programmer looking for the line of code that cause some software to fail, or an economist trying to determine whether austerity caused a subsequent depression. Halpern applies and expands an approach to causality that he and Judea Pearl developed, based on structural equations. He carefully formulates a definition of causality, and building on this, defines degree of responsibility, degree of blame, and causal explanation. He concludes by discussing how these ideas can be applied to such practical problems as accountability and program verification. Technical details are generally confined to the final section of each chapter and can be skipped by non-mathematical readers.
Book Synopsis Free Will, Causality, and Neuroscience by :
Download or read book Free Will, Causality, and Neuroscience written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2019-10-21 with total page 191 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Neuroscientists often consider free will to be an illusion. Contrary to this hypothesis, the contributions to this volume show that recent developments in neuroscience can also support the existence of free will. Firstly, the possibility of intentional consciousness is studied. Secondly, Libet’s experiments are discussed from this new perspective. Thirdly, the relationship between free will, causality and language is analyzed. This approach suggests that language grants the human brain a possibility to articulate a meaningful personal life. Therefore, human beings can escape strict biological determinism. Contributing author Sofia Bonicalzi has received funding from the European Union’s Framework Programme for Research and Innovation Horizon 2020 (2014-2020) under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Grant Agreement No. 754388 (LMUResearchFellows) and from LMUexcellent, funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and the Free State of Bavaria under the Excellence Strategy of the German Federal Government and the Länder.
Book Synopsis A Theory of Causation in the Social and Biological Sciences by : A. Reutlinger
Download or read book A Theory of Causation in the Social and Biological Sciences written by A. Reutlinger and published by Springer. This book was released on 2013-03-18 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This first full length treatment of interventionist theories of causation in the social sciences, the biological sciences and other higher-level sciences the presents original counter arguments to recent trends in the debate and serves as useful introduction to the subject.
Book Synopsis Dispositionalism by : Anne Sophie Meincke
Download or read book Dispositionalism written by Anne Sophie Meincke and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-04-08 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: According to dispositional realism, or dispositionalism, the entities inhabiting our world possess irreducibly dispositional properties – often called ‘powers’ – by means of which they are sources of change. Dispositionalism has become increasingly popular among metaphysicians in the last three decades as it offers a realist account of causation and provides novel avenues for understanding modality, laws of nature, agency, free will and other key concepts in metaphysics. At the same time, it is receiving growing interest among philosophers of science. This reflects the substantial role scientific findings play in arguments for dispositionalism which, as a metaphysics of science, aims to unveil the very foundations of science. The present collection of essays brings together both strands of interest. It elucidates the ontological profile of dispositionalism by exploring its ontological commitments, and it discusses these from the perspective of the philosophy of science. The essays are written by both proponents of dispositionalism and sceptics so as to initiate an open-minded, constructive dialogue.
Book Synopsis Making Things Happen by : James Woodward
Download or read book Making Things Happen written by James Woodward and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2003 with total page 426 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In doing so, he shows how the manipulationist account both illuminates important features of successful causal explanation in the natural and social sciences and avoids the counterexamples and difficulties that infect alternative approaches, from the deductive-nomological model onward."--BOOK JACKET.
Book Synopsis Understanding Counterfactuals, Understanding Causation by : Christoph Hoerl
Download or read book Understanding Counterfactuals, Understanding Causation written by Christoph Hoerl and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2011-10-27 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How are causal judgements such as 'The ice on the road caused the traffic accident' connected with counterfactual judgements such as 'If there had not been any ice on the road, the traffic accident would not have happened'? This volume throws new light on this question by uniting, for the first time, psychological and philosophical approaches to causation and counterfactuals. Traditionally, philosophers have primarily been interested in connections between causal and counterfactual claims on the level of meaning or truth-conditions. More recently, however, they have also increasingly turned their attention to psychological connections between causal and counterfactual understanding or reasoning. At the same time, there has been a surge in interest in empirical work on causal and counterfactual cognition amongst developmental, cognitive, and social psychologists—much of it inspired by work in philosophy. In this volume, twelve original contributions from leading philosophers and psychologists explore in detail what bearing empirical findings might have on philosophical concerns about counterfactuals and causation, and how, in turn, work in philosophy might help clarify the issues at stake in empirical work on the cognitive underpinnings of, and relationships between, causal and counterfactual thought.
Book Synopsis Reduction and Emergence in Science and Philosophy by : Carl Gillett
Download or read book Reduction and Emergence in Science and Philosophy written by Carl Gillett and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2016-09-08 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Grand debates over reduction and emergence are playing out across the sciences, but these debates have reached a stalemate, with both sides declaring victory on empirical grounds. In this book, Carl Gillett provides new theoretical frameworks with which to understand these debates, illuminating both the novel positions of scientific reductionists and emergentists and the recent empirical advances that drive these new views. Gillett also highlights the flaws in existing philosophical frameworks and reorients the discussion to reflect the new scientific advances and issues, including the nature of 'parts' and 'wholes', the character of aggregation, and thus the continuity of nature itself. Most importantly, Gillett shows how disputes about concrete scientific cases are empirically resolvable and hence how we can break the scientific stalemate. Including a detailed glossary of key terms, this volume will be valuable for researchers and advanced students of the philosophy of science and metaphysics, and scientific researchers working in the area.
Book Synopsis Elements of Causal Inference by : Jonas Peters
Download or read book Elements of Causal Inference written by Jonas Peters and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2017-11-29 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A concise and self-contained introduction to causal inference, increasingly important in data science and machine learning. The mathematization of causality is a relatively recent development, and has become increasingly important in data science and machine learning. This book offers a self-contained and concise introduction to causal models and how to learn them from data. After explaining the need for causal models and discussing some of the principles underlying causal inference, the book teaches readers how to use causal models: how to compute intervention distributions, how to infer causal models from observational and interventional data, and how causal ideas could be exploited for classical machine learning problems. All of these topics are discussed first in terms of two variables and then in the more general multivariate case. The bivariate case turns out to be a particularly hard problem for causal learning because there are no conditional independences as used by classical methods for solving multivariate cases. The authors consider analyzing statistical asymmetries between cause and effect to be highly instructive, and they report on their decade of intensive research into this problem. The book is accessible to readers with a background in machine learning or statistics, and can be used in graduate courses or as a reference for researchers. The text includes code snippets that can be copied and pasted, exercises, and an appendix with a summary of the most important technical concepts.
