By James Woodward
Woodward's lengthy awaited e-book is an try and build a accomplished account of causation clarification that applies to a wide selection of causal and explanatory claims in numerous parts of technological know-how and way of life. The ebook engages a few of the correct literature from different disciplines, as Woodward weaves jointly examples, counterexamples, criticisms, defenses, objections, and replies right into a convincing security of the middle of his idea, that's that we will research causation by means of entice the concept of manipulation.
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Additional resources for Making Things Happen: A Theory of Causal Explanation (Oxford Studies in the Philosophy of Science)
Example text
Philosophers who have thought that causal notions are metaphysically excessive (or import problematic metaphysical baggage) have been influenced by many different arguments, but one important consideration has been the suspicion that we could accomplish all of our legitimate purposes if we had no causal knowledge or beliefs at all, but instead made do with weaker forms of knowledge (such as knowledge of correlations). Part of the attraction of a manipulability theory is that it helps us to see that there are legitimate and important purposes, purposes that are rooted in our interests as practical agents and that we could hardly fail to have if we are to go on living.
Yet another point is that even in the absence of a fully reductive account of causation and explanation, it may be possible to test or elucidate the content of particular causal and explanatory claims and show how they can be tested by appealing to other particular causal/explanatory claims and noncausal information such as correlational claims. , €2 causes £2) is true, along with other noncausal information, perhaps about correlations. The theory I propose has this sort of structure: it holds that we may test or elucidate the claim that C causes E by appealing to what will happen to E under an intervention on C.
6 A plausible manipulability theory will not deny that reliable causal inference on the basis of nonexperimental evidence is possible, but rather, suggests a specific way of thinking about such inferences: we should think of them as an attempt to determine (on the basis of other kinds of evidence) what the results of a suitably designed hypothetical experiment or manipulation would be without actually carrying out this experiment. For example, for moral and political reasons, among others, one cannot carry out experiments in which some children are randomly assigned to public and others to private school and their subsequent academic careers observed.