The “model argument” against action-theories of causation is a reply to a strategy for avoiding the “argument of unmanipulable causes”. The critics follow the action- theorists in a certain shift of topic – leaving the explication debate towards one of justified assertion of causal claims – and end up at a wrong position concerning the role of practical knowledge for justifying causal claims about events that are not under technical control. Following them the justification would take the form of “analogy (...) arguments“, which can not guarantee the truth of the conclusion in a non-circular way. Contrary to their position I present a reconstruction of causal inference in which practical knowledge about manipulation does play the role of a necessary condition for justifiying causal claims about unmanipulable relations. (shrink)

Philosophical theories of causation are commonly judged by their ability to correctly determine whether there is a causal relation present in intuitively clear example scenarios. If the theories survive this test, they are then used to answer big philosophical questions about causation. This Method of Examples is attractive because it seems to allow us to determine the quality of a theory of causation independently of answering the big philosophical questions; which is good, since it means that we can then non-circularly (...) use the theories judged to be best to answer those questions. However, the current article argues that this virtue of the Method of Examples is an illusion. In particular, I argue that the necessary step of judging whether a proposed analysis of causation is reductive can only be taken after many of the most vexing philosophical questions about causation have already been answered. It is then shown that a rejection of the methodological supremacy of the Method of Examples leads to a more pluralistic method of judging theories of causation, a pluralism that benefits non-standard approaches like interventionism and agency theories. (shrink)

Causation has always been a philosophically controversial subject matter. While David Hume’s empiricist account of causation has been the dominant influence in analytic philosophy and science during modern times, a minority view has instead connected causation essentially to agency and manipulation. A related approach has for the first time gained widespread popularity in recent years, due to new powerful theories of causal inference in science that are based in a technical notion of intervention, and James Woodward’s closely connected interventionist theory (...) of causation in philosophy. This monograph assesses five manipulationist or interventionist theories of causation, viewed as theories that purport to tell us what causation is by providing us with the meaning of causal claims. It is shown that they cannot do this, as the conditions on causation that they impose are too weak, mainly due to ineliminable circularities in their definitions of causal terms. It is then argued that a subset of Woodward’s theory can nevertheless contribute crucially to an explanation of the unique role that manipulation has in our acquisition of causal knowledge. This explanation differs from the common regularist explanation of the epistemic utility of manipulation and experiment, and it is taken to confirm several important manipulationist intuitions. However, the success of the explanation depends on (this subset of) interventionism not itself being understood as a theory of causation, but as a theory of intervention. (shrink)