What is the relationship between causal relations among events (or causal explanations or hypotheses) and the relevance of evidence? I have been wrestling with this question for a long time. I have found an excellent book that sheds much light on this question. See James Woodward, Making Things Happen (Oxford University Press 2003).Woodward has useful comments about Nancy Cartwright's intriguing skeptical attitude toward causal explanations. See, e.g., Nancy Cartwright, The Dappled World: A Study of the Boundaries of Science (Cambridge University Press 1999) and her more recent book (which I have not yet read) Hunting Causes and Using Them: Approaches in Philosophy and Economics (Cambridge University Press 2007).
Woodward professes to be an admirer of Judea Pearl -- and Woodward's approach in some particulars does follow Pearl's. But Woodward (I am pleased to say) emphasizes more than Pearl has (I think) that rational relevance judgments are possible (and common) even in the absence of anything that might resemble a full-blown theory (or even a half-baked theory) of causal connections in a particular situation.
James Woodward uses nice examples (mostly from the sciences) to illustrate his points.
Amazon.com's "book description" of Cartwright's 2007 collection of papers (see citation above) suggests that Cartwright uses her latest book to make a counterattack against critics such as Woodward: Hunting Causes and Using Them argues that causation is not one thing, as commonly assumed, but many. There is a huge variety of causal relations, each with different characterizing features, different methods for discovery and different uses to which it can be put. In this collection of new and previously published essays, Nancy Cartwright provides a critical survey of philosophical and economic literature on causality, with a special focus on the currently fashionable Bayes-nets and invariance methods – and it exposes a huge gap in that literature. Almost every account treats either exclusively how to hunt causes or how to use them. But where is the bridge between? It’s no good knowing how to warrant a causal claim if we don’t know what we can do with that claim once we have it. This book will interest philosophers, economists and social scientists.
2 comments:
Hi Peter,
If you are not familiar with this article on causality, you may find it interesting. www.jfsowa.com/ontology/causal.htm.
It quotes Charles Sanders Pierce: "Those who make causality one of the original uralt elements in the universe or one of the fundamental categories of thought - of whom you will find that I am not one - have one very awkward fact to explain away. It is that men's conceptions of a cause are in different stages of scientific culture entirely different and inconsistent. The great principle of causation which, we are told, it is absolutely impossible not to believe, has been one proposition at one period in history and an entirely disparate one at another is still a third one for the modern physicist. The only thing about it which has stood... is the name of it." Reasoning and the Logic of Things.
Best regards,
Joseph
Joseph,
Many thanks for the comment.
I'm pretty well convinced there is causality in our world -- i.e., that sometimes events at time T influence events at time T + n. (Such causal connections can take a probabilistic form as well as an invariant form; e.g., they can take the form of event X + event Y -> [p(A-event) = .923]) {Feel free to substitute "state" for "event."}
The question, of course, is so what? Another questions is whether all forms of causality, or causation, are alike. (Quite possibly -- very probably -- "causation" is a name for many notions or for many species of a notion.) Another question is how we uncover causation. Another question is how we draw inferences when our knowledge of causes as incomplete (as it always is).
Put it this way: We know so very little about what makes the world and people work the way that they do. Yet we sometimes can make pretty good guesses (inferences) about what happened, what's happening, what will happen. Isn't that remarkable? But isn't that a fact? And how is that possible?
Is there something buried in the human organism that by looking about at fragmentary information often sniffs out how how some pertinent things work even though the human organism -- i.e., a mensch, a member of homo sapiens -- can't come close to providing a scientific causal account of what makes the pertinent sector of reality -- be it world, beast, or man -- work as it does?
Perhaps the old medieval theory of signs is not as nonsensical as [almost] everyone since Descartes or so [everyone, that is, with a pretense of being an intellectual] has thought.
Mmm. Radical thought. I will elaborate in the months and years to come. (But the basis for almost everything I will say is already apparent in my written ditherings heretofore.)
Post a Comment