Abstract
There have recently been a number of important advances in the philosophy of causation, which impact our understanding of both the nature of causation and of causal reasoning. Two stand out in particular: First, a large body of work on the way that normative factors can influence causal judgement casts doubt on the intuitive idea that causation is a purely natural relation, independent of human interests and values. Second, the so-called ‘causal modelling framework’—developed by computer scientists and statisticians as a formalism for discovering causal relations—has turned out to be a powerful and extremely fruitful method for representing causal systems. It has also been incorporated into the philosophy of causation as the basis of James Woodward’s influential interventionist (or manipulability) theory (Woodward 2003). The aim of this paper is to provide an introduction to these recent developments, to show how they are related, and to comment on their relevance to linguistics.
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Notes
- 1.
For an overview of existing theories of causation from two linguists’ perspective, see Copley & Wolff (2015).
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- 3.
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- 5.
- 6.
The phrase ‘Casper’s failure to water my plant’ refers to an omission—that is, the non-occurrence of an event, rather than the occurrence of an event. One of the advantages of the counterfactual approach to causation is that it allows that omissions can be causes, as does natural language (think of negligence, for example).
- 7.
Hitchcock & Knobe frame their argument using the causal modelling framework, and their talk of ‘intervening’ is naturally associated with the formal notion of an intervention that has been developed within this framework and the associated interventionist theory. However, this is to some extent misleading: by ‘suitable targets of intervention’, they just mean those events that make sense for us to try to manipulate.
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For Woodward’s detailed characterisation of the notion of an intervention, see (2003, 98–99).
- 11.
Notice that ‘intervention’ is itself a causal notion. This entails that interventionism is a non-reductive theory of causation—that is, it doesn’t attempt to reduce causal facts to facts about some non-causal phenomenon. Since Woodward doesn’t intend to provide a metaphysics of causation (see Sect. 14.5), this doesn’t create a problem.
- 12.
This is not to say that causes and effects are not (generally) connected by a physical process, but just that according to interventionism, the existence of a particular kind of physical process is neither necessary nor sufficient for the existence of a causal relationship.
- 13.
Causal models are further connected to (iii) in that each model encodes a set of counterfactuals. For example, we have seen that Fig. 14.1 asserts that there is a possible intervention on the amount of rainfall (R) that makes a difference to the river level (RL). This entails that there is a true counterfactual with the following form: if it were to rain x amount (rather than x′ amount), the river level would be y (rather than y′).
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The default values are the values that the variable normally takes (i.e. those that it takes in the normal course of evolution).
- 16.
Adapted from Menzies (2009, 360).
- 17.
Menzies expresses his account more formally as follows:
A value of a variable X makes a difference to the value of another variable Y in a default causal model if and only if plugging in the default values of the variables in the structural equations yields X = x and Y = y and there exist actual values x′ ≠ x and y′ ≠ y such that the result of replacing the equation for X with X = x′ yields Y = y′ (2007, 208, italics in the original).
- 18.
Perhaps over a particular period of time: the average rainfall for June, say.
- 19.
The philosophers’ term ‘causal claim’ is ambiguous between an actual piece of causal discourse—that is, a causal locution—and an abstract causal statement, independent of any actual utterance. In this section I have disambiguated by referring to the former as a causal locution, and only the latter as a causal claim.
- 20.
- 21.
Woodward himself describes his project as ‘semantic or interpretive’ (2003, 38).
- 22.
For a defence of the claim that interventionism should be seen a methodological project, see Woodward (2014, 2015). Roughly, he argues that the methodological questions he wants to answer are largely independent of metaphysical considerations, and that interventionism is consistent with a range of different positions in the metaphysics of causation (2008, 194), between which he has no interest in adjudicating.
- 23.
- 24.
The notion of ‘event’ that is used in the philosophy of causation is generally accepted to include states of affairs.
- 25.
For a good introduction to this problem, see Hall (2007b).
- 26.
There are, however, non-metaphysical restrictions on the choice of variables. See Hitchcock (2007a, 520–503).
- 27.
In the paper cited above, Woodward considers the interrelated notions of stability, level of description, and specificity, which are used to distinguish different (kinds of) causal relationships.
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- 29.
Much recent work in the cognitive psychology of causal inference also assumes that causal inference requires that we are able to represent a network of directed relations between variables. For an overview, see Lagnado (2011).
- 30.
Copley & Wolff discuss this issue; see (2015).
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Statham, G. (2020). Causes as Deviations from the Normal: Recent Advances in the Philosophy of Causation. In: Bar-Asher Siegal, E., Boneh, N. (eds) Perspectives on Causation. Jerusalem Studies in Philosophy and History of Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34308-8_14
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