Switch to: References

Add citations

You must login to add citations.
  1. Bayesian Cognitive Science, Unification, and Explanation.Stephan Hartmann & Matteo Colombo - 2017 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 68 (2).
    It is often claimed that the greatest value of the Bayesian framework in cognitive science consists in its unifying power. Several Bayesian cognitive scientists assume that unification is obviously linked to explanatory power. But this link is not obvious, as unification in science is a heterogeneous notion, which may have little to do with explanation. While a crucial feature of most adequate explanations in cognitive science is that they reveal aspects of the causal mechanism that produces the phenomenon to be (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   44 citations  
  • Constitutive Relevance, Mutual Manipulability, and Fat-Handedness.Michael Baumgartner & Alexander Gebharter - 2016 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 67 (3):731-756.
    The first part of this paper argues that if Craver’s ([2007a], [2007b]) popular mutual manipulability account (MM) of mechanistic constitution is embedded within Woodward’s ([2003]) interventionist theory of causation--for which it is explicitly designed--it either undermines the mechanistic research paradigm by entailing that there do not exist relationships of constitutive relevance or it gives rise to the unwanted consequence that constitution is a form of causation. The second part shows how Woodward’s theory can be adapted in such a way that (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   79 citations  
  • Why There’s No Cause to Randomize.John Worrall - 2007 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 58 (3):451-488.
    The evidence from randomized controlled trials (RCTs) is widely regarded as supplying the ‘gold standard’ in medicine—we may sometimes have to settle for other forms of evidence, but this is always epistemically second-best. But how well justified is the epistemic claim about the superiority of RCTs? This paper adds to my earlier (predominantly negative) analyses of the claims produced in favour of the idea that randomization plays a uniquely privileged epistemic role, by closely inspecting three related arguments from leading contributors (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   106 citations  
  • Anti-reductionist Interventionism.Reuben Stern & Benjamin Eva - 2023 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 74 (1):241-267.
    Kim’s causal exclusion argument purports to demonstrate that the non-reductive physicalist must treat mental properties (and macro-level properties in general) as causally inert. A number of authors have attempted to resist Kim’s conclusion by utilizing the conceptual resources of Woodward’s interventionist conception of causation. The viability of these responses has been challenged by Gebharter, who argues that the causal exclusion argument is vindicated by the theory of causal Bayesian networks (CBNs). Since the interventionist conception of causation relies crucially on CBNs (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   7 citations  
  • The Importance of Understanding Deep Learning.Tim Räz & Claus Beisbart - 2024 - Erkenntnis 89 (5).
    Some machine learning models, in particular deep neural networks (DNNs), are not very well understood; nevertheless, they are frequently used in science. Does this lack of understanding pose a problem for using DNNs to understand empirical phenomena? Emily Sullivan has recently argued that understanding with DNNs is not limited by our lack of understanding of DNNs themselves. In the present paper, we will argue, _contra_ Sullivan, that our current lack of understanding of DNNs does limit our ability to understand with (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   10 citations  
  • Epistemic Democracy with Defensible Premises.Franz Dietrich & Kai Spiekermann - 2013 - Economics and Philosophy 29 (1):87--120.
    The contemporary theory of epistemic democracy often draws on the Condorcet Jury Theorem to formally justify the ‘wisdom of crowds’. But this theorem is inapplicable in its current form, since one of its premises – voter independence – is notoriously violated. This premise carries responsibility for the theorem's misleading conclusion that ‘large crowds are infallible’. We prove a more useful jury theorem: under defensible premises, ‘large crowds are fallible but better than small groups’. This theorem rehabilitates the importance of deliberation (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   44 citations  
  • Quantifying proportionality and the limits of higher-level causation and explanation.Alexander Gebharter & Markus Ilkka Eronen - 2023 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 74 (3):573-601.
    Supporters of the autonomy of higher-level causation (or explanation) often appeal to proportionality, arguing that higher-level causes are more proportional than their lower-level realizers. Recently, measures based on information theory and causal modeling have been proposed that allow one to shed new light on proportionality and the related notion of specificity. In this paper we apply ideas from this literature to the issue of higher vs. lower-level causation (and explanation). Surprisingly, proportionality turns out to be irrelevant for the question of (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   8 citations  
  • A Probabilistic Semantics for Counterfactuals. Part A.Hannes Leitgeb - 2012 - Review of Symbolic Logic 5 (1):26-84.
    This is part A of a paper in which we defend a semantics for counterfactuals which is probabilistic in the sense that the truth condition for counterfactuals refers to a probability measure. Because of its probabilistic nature, it allows a counterfactual ‘ifAthenB’ to be true even in the presence of relevant ‘Aand notB’-worlds, as long such exceptions are not too widely spread. The semantics is made precise and studied in different versions which are related to each other by representation theorems. (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   53 citations  
  • The Confounding Question of Confounding Causes in Randomized Trials.Jonathan Fuller - 2019 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 70 (3):901-926.
    It is sometimes thought that randomized study group allocation is uniquely proficient at producing comparison groups that are evenly balanced for all confounding causes. Philosophers have argued that in real randomized controlled trials this balance assumption typically fails. But is the balance assumption an important ideal? I run a thought experiment, the CONFOUND study, to answer this question. I then suggest a new account of causal inference in ideal and real comparative group studies that helps clarify the roles of confounding (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   13 citations  
  • What is social structural explanation? A causal account.Lauren N. Ross - 2023 - Noûs 1 (1):163-179.
    Social scientists appeal to various “structures” in their explanations including public policies, economic systems, and social hierarchies. Significant debate surrounds the explanatory relevance of these factors for various outcomes such as health, behavioral, and economic patterns. This paper provides a causal account of social structural explanation that is motivated by Haslanger (2016). This account suggests that social structure can be explanatory in virtue of operating as a causal constraint, which is a causal factor with unique characteristics. A novel causal framework (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  • The Worldly Infrastructure of Causation.Naftali Weinberger, Porter Williams & James Woodward - forthcoming - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  • Response to Strevens.Jim Woodward - 2008 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 77 (1):193-212.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   65 citations  
  • The Concept of Validity.Denny Borsboom, Gideon J. Mellenbergh & Jaap van Heerden - 2004 - Psychological Review 111 (4):1061-1071.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   73 citations  
  • Population Pluralism and Natural Selection.Jacob Stegenga - 2016 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 67 (1):1-29.
    I defend a radical interpretation of biological populations—what I call population pluralism—which holds that there are many ways that a particular grouping of individuals can be related such that the grouping satisfies the conditions necessary for those individuals to evolve together. More constraining accounts of biological populations face empirical counter-examples and conceptual difficulties. One of the most intuitive and frequently employed conditions, causal connectivity—itself beset with numerous difficulties—is best construed by considering the relevant causal relations as ‘thick’ causal concepts. I (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   17 citations  
  • The theoretical status of latent variables.Denny Borsboom, Gideon J. Mellenbergh & Jaap van Heerden - 2003 - Psychological Review 110 (2):203-219.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   63 citations  
  • Varieties of Error and Varieties of Evidence in Scientific Inference.Barbara Osimani & Jürgen Landes - 2023 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 74 (1):117-170.
    According to the variety of evidence thesis items of evidence from independent lines of investigation are more confirmatory, ceteris paribus, than, for example, replications of analogous studies. This thesis is known to fail (Bovens and Hartmann; Claveau). However, the results obtained by Bovens and Hartmann only concern instruments whose evidence is either fully random or perfectly reliable; instead, for Claveau, unreliability is modelled as deterministic bias. In both cases, the unreliable instrument delivers totally irrelevant information. We present a model that (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   6 citations  
  • The Appeal to Expert Opinion: Quantitative Support for a Bayesian Network Approach.Adam J. L. Harris, Ulrike Hahn, Jens K. Madsen & Anne S. Hsu - 2016 - Cognitive Science 40 (6):1496-1533.
    The appeal to expert opinion is an argument form that uses the verdict of an expert to support a position or hypothesis. A previous scheme-based treatment of the argument form is formalized within a Bayesian network that is able to capture the critical aspects of the argument form, including the central considerations of the expert's expertise and trustworthiness. We propose this as an appropriate normative framework for the argument form, enabling the development and testing of quantitative predictions as to how (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   28 citations  
  • A Proposed Probabilistic Extension of the Halpern and Pearl Definition of ‘Actual Cause’.Luke Fenton-Glynn - 2017 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 68 (4):1061-1124.
    ABSTRACT Joseph Halpern and Judea Pearl draw upon structural equation models to develop an attractive analysis of ‘actual cause’. Their analysis is designed for the case of deterministic causation. I show that their account can be naturally extended to provide an elegant treatment of probabilistic causation. 1Introduction 2Preemption 3Structural Equation Models 4The Halpern and Pearl Definition of ‘Actual Cause’ 5Preemption Again 6The Probabilistic Case 7Probabilistic Causal Models 8A Proposed Probabilistic Extension of Halpern and Pearl’s Definition 9Twardy and Korb’s Account 10Probabilistic (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   13 citations  
  • Contrastive causation in the law.Jonathan Schaffer - 2010 - Legal Theory 16 (4):259-297.
    What conception of causation is at work in the law? I argue that the law implicitly relies on a contrastive conception. In a liability case where the defendant's breach of duty must be shown to have caused the plaintiff's damages, it is not enough to consider what would have happened if the cause had not occurredthe law requires us to look to a specific replacement for the effect, which in this case is the hypothetical outcome in which the plaintiff came (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   29 citations  
  • The Relation between Kin and Multilevel Selection: An Approach Using Causal Graphs.Samir Okasha - 2016 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 67 (2):435-470.
    Kin selection and multilevel selection are alternative approaches for studying the evolution of social behaviour, the relation between which has long been a source of controversy. Many recent theorists regard the two approaches as ultimately equivalent, on the grounds that gene frequency change can be correctly expressed using either. However, this shows only that the two are formally equivalent, not that they offer equally good causal representations of the evolutionary process. This article articulates the notion of an ‘adequate causal representation’ (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   22 citations  
  • A Probabilistic Analysis of Causation.Luke Glynn - 2011 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 62 (2):343-392.
    The starting point in the development of probabilistic analyses of token causation has usually been the naïve intuition that, in some relevant sense, a cause raises the probability of its effect. But there are well-known examples both of non-probability-raising causation and of probability-raising non-causation. Sophisticated extant probabilistic analyses treat many such cases correctly, but only at the cost of excluding the possibilities of direct non-probability-raising causation, failures of causal transitivity, action-at-a-distance, prevention, and causation by absence and omission. I show that (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   22 citations  
  • Causal Foundations of Evolutionary Genetics.Jun Otsuka - 2016 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 67 (1):247-269.
    The causal nature of evolution is one of the central topics in the philosophy of biology. The issue concerns whether equations used in evolutionary genetics point to some causal processes or purely phenomenological patterns. To address this question the present article builds well-defined causal models that underlie standard equations in evolutionary genetics. These models are based on minimal and biologically plausible hypotheses about selection and reproduction, and generate statistics to predict evolutionary changes. The causal reconstruction of the evolutionary principles shows (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   22 citations  
  • Variety of Evidence.Jürgen Landes - 2020 - Erkenntnis 85 (1):183-223.
    Varied evidence confirms more strongly than less varied evidence, ceteris paribus. This epistemological Variety of Evidence Thesis enjoys widespread intuitive support. We put forward a novel explication of one notion of varied evidence and the Variety of Evidence Thesis within Bayesian models of scientific inference by appealing to measures of entropy. Our explication of the Variety of Evidence Thesis holds in many of our models which also pronounce on disconfirmatory and discordant evidence. We argue that our models pronounce rightly. Against (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   12 citations  
  • Causal Sufficiency and Actual Causation.Sander Beckers - 2021 - Journal of Philosophical Logic 50 (6):1341-1374.
    Pearl opened the door to formally defining actual causation using causal models. His approach rests on two strategies: first, capturing the widespread intuition that X = x causes Y = y iff X = x is a Necessary Element of a Sufficient Set for Y = y, and second, showing that his definition gives intuitive answers on a wide set of problem cases. This inspired dozens of variations of his definition of actual causation, the most prominent of which are due (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   7 citations  
  • Modal inferences in science: a tale of two epistemologies.Ilmari Hirvonen, Rami Koskinen & Ilkka Pättiniemi - 2021 - Synthese 199 (5-6):13823-13843.
    Recent epistemology of modality has seen a growing trend towards metaphysics-first approaches. Contrastingly, this paper offers a more philosophically modest account of justifying modal claims, focusing on the practices of scientific modal inferences. Two ways of making such inferences are identified and analyzed: actualist-manipulationist modality and relative modality. In AM, what is observed to be or not to be the case in actuality or under manipulations, allows us to make modal inferences. AM-based inferences are fallible, but the same holds for (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  • Control variables and mental causation.John Campbell - 2010 - Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 110 (1pt1):15-30.
    I introduce the notion of a ‘control variable’ which gives us a way of seeing how mental causation could be an unproblematic case of causation in general, rather than being some sui generis form of causation. Psychological variables may be the control variables for a system for which there are no physical control variables, even in a deterministic physical world. That explains how there can be psychological causation without physical causation, even in a deterministic physical world.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   33 citations  
  • Experimental Artefacts.Carl F. Craver & Talia Dan-Cohen - 2024 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 75 (1):253-274.
    A core, constitutive norm of science is to remove or remedy the artefacts in one’s data. Here, we consider examples of artefacts from many fields of science (for example, astronomy, economics, electrophysiology, psychology, and systems neuroscience) and discuss their contribution to a more general evidential selection problem at the heart of the epistemology of evidence. Synthesizing and building on previously disparate discussions in many areas of the philosophy of science, we provide a novel, causal–pragmatic account that fits the examples and (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  • On coherent sets and the transmission of confirmation.Franz Dietrich & Luca Moretti - 2005 - Philosophy of Science 72 (3):403-424.
    In this paper, we identify a new and mathematically well-defined sense in which the coherence of a set of hypotheses can be truth-conducive. Our focus is not, as usual, on the probability but on the confirmation of a coherent set and its members. We show that, if evidence confirms a hypothesis, confirmation is “transmitted” to any hypotheses that are sufficiently coherent with the former hypothesis, according to some appropriate probabilistic coherence measure such as Olsson’s or Fitelson’s measure. Our findings have (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   30 citations  
  • Partial liability.Alex Kaiserman - 2017 - Legal Theory 23 (1):1-26.
    In most cases, liability in tort law is all-or-nothing—a defendant is either fully liable or not at all liable for a claimant's loss. By contrast, this paper defends a causal theory of partial liability. I argue that a defendant should be held liable for a claimant's loss only to the degree to which the defendant's wrongdoing contributed to the causing of the loss. I ground this principle in a conception of tort law as a system of corrective justice and use (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   17 citations  
  • A Causal Bayes Net Analysis of Glennan’s Mechanistic Account of Higher-Level Causation.Alexander Gebharter - 2022 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 73 (1):185-210.
    One of Stuart Glennan's most prominent contributions to the new mechanist debate consists in his reductive analysis of higher-level causation in terms of mechanisms (Glennan, 1996). In this paper I employ the causal Bayes net framework to reconstruct his analysis. This allows for specifying general assumptions which have to be satis ed to get Glennan's approach working. I show that once these assumptions are in place, they imply (against the background of the causal Bayes net machinery) that higher-level causation indeed (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   5 citations  
  • Time travel and counterfactual asymmetry.Alison Fernandes - 2021 - Synthese 198 (3):1983-2001.
    We standardly evaluate counterfactuals and abilities in temporally asymmetric terms—by keeping the past fixed and holding the future open. Only future events depend counterfactually on what happens now. Past events do not. Conversely, past events are relevant to what abilities one has now in a way that future events are not. Lewis, Sider and others continue to evaluate counterfactuals and abilities in temporally asymmetric terms, even in cases of backwards time travel. I’ll argue that we need more temporally neutral methods. (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   6 citations  
  • The Meaning of Cause and Prevent: The Role of Causal Mechanism.Clare R. Walsh & Steven A. Sloman - 2011 - Mind and Language 26 (1):21-52.
    How do people understand questions about cause and prevent? Some theories propose that people affirm that A causes B if A's occurrence makes a difference to B's occurrence in one way or another. Other theories propose that A causes B if some quantity or symbol gets passed in some way from A to B. The aim of our studies is to compare these theories' ability to explain judgements of causation and prevention. We describe six experiments that compare judgements for causal (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   28 citations  
  • Assessing interactive causal influence.Laura R. Novick & Patricia W. Cheng - 2004 - Psychological Review 111 (2):455-485.
    The discovery of conjunctive causes--factors that act in concert to produce or prevent an effect--has been explained by purely covariational theories. Such theories assume that concomitant variations in observable events directly license causal inferences, without postulating the existence of unobservable causal relations. This article discusses problems with these theories, proposes a causal-power theory that overcomes the problems, and reports empirical evidence favoring the new theory. Unlike earlier models, the new theory derives (a) the conditions under which covariation implies conjunctive causation (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   41 citations  
  • (1 other version)An Interventionist’s Guide to Exotic Choice.Reuben Stern - 2021 - Mind 130 (518):537-566.
    In this paper, I use interventionist causal models to identify some novel Newcomb problems, and subsequently use these problems to refine existing interventionist treatments of causal decision theory. The new Newcomb problems that make trouble for existing interventionist treatments involve so-called ‘exotic choice’—that is, decision-making contexts where the agent has evidence about the outcome of her choice. I argue that when choice is exotic, the interventionist can adequately capture causal decision-theoretic reasoning by introducing a new interventionist approach to updating on (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  • 'Logic Will Get You From A to B, Imagination Will Take You Anywhere'.Francesco Berto - 2023 - Noûs (3):717-729.
    There is some consensus on the claim that imagination as suppositional thinking can have epistemic value insofar as it’s constrained by a principle of minimal alteration of how we know or believe reality to be – compatibly with the need to accommodate the supposition initiating the imaginative exercise. But in the philosophy of imagination there is no formally precise account of how exactly such minimal alteration is to work. I propose one. I focus on counterfactual imagination, arguing that this can (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • (1 other version)Discovering Psychological Principles by Mining Naturally Occurring Data Sets.Robert L. Goldstone & Gary Lupyan - 2016 - Topics in Cognitive Science 8 (3):548-568.
    The very expertise with which psychologists wield their tools for achieving laboratory control may have had the unwelcome effect of blinding psychologists to the possibilities of discovering principles of behavior without conducting experiments. When creatively interrogated, a diverse range of large, real-world data sets provides powerful diagnostic tools for revealing principles of human judgment, perception, categorization, decision-making, language use, inference, problem solving, and representation. Examples of these data sets include patterns of website links, dictionaries, logs of group interactions, collections of (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   17 citations  
  • Interventionist decision theory.Reuben Stern - 2017 - Synthese 194 (10):4133-4153.
    Jim Joyce has argued that David Lewis’s formulation of causal decision theory is inadequate because it fails to apply to the “small world” decisions that people face in real life. Meanwhile, several authors have argued that causal decision theory should be developed such that it integrates the interventionist approach to causal modeling because of the expressive power afforded by the language of causal models, but, as of now, there has been little work towards this end. In this paper, I propose (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   13 citations  
  • Here is the evidence, now what is the hypothesis? The complementary roles of inductive and hypothesis‐driven science in the post‐genomic era.Douglas B. Kell & Stephen G. Oliver - 2004 - Bioessays 26 (1):99-105.
    It is considered in some quarters that hypothesis‐driven methods are the only valuable, reliable or significant means of scientific advance. Data‐driven or ‘inductive’ advances in scientific knowledge are then seen as marginal, irrelevant, insecure or wrong‐headed, while the development of technology—which is not of itself ‘hypothesis‐led’ (beyond the recognition that such tools might be of value)—must be seen as equally irrelevant to the hypothetico‐deductive scientific agenda. We argue here that data‐ and technology‐driven programmes are not alternatives to hypothesis‐led studies in (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   34 citations  
  • Causal Explanatory Power.Benjamin Eva & Reuben Stern - 2019 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 70 (4):1029-1050.
    Schupbach and Sprenger introduce a novel probabilistic approach to measuring the explanatory power that a given explanans exerts over a corresponding explanandum. Though we are sympathetic to their general approach, we argue that it does not adequately capture the way in which the causal explanatory power that c exerts on e varies with background knowledge. We then amend their approach so that it does capture this variance. Though our account of explanatory power is less ambitious than Schupbach and Sprenger’s in (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   9 citations  
  • A Simple Logic of Functional Dependence.Alexandru Baltag & Johan van Benthem - 2021 - Journal of Philosophical Logic 50 (5):939-1005.
    This paper presents a simple decidable logic of functional dependence LFD, based on an extension of classical propositional logic with dependence atoms plus dependence quantifiers treated as modalities, within the setting of generalized assignment semantics for first order logic. The expressive strength, complete proof calculus and meta-properties of LFD are explored. Various language extensions are presented as well, up to undecidable modal-style logics for independence and dynamic logics of changing dependence models. Finally, more concrete settings for dependence are discussed: continuous (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   5 citations  
  • No Revolution Necessary: Neural Mechanisms for Economics.Carl F. Craver - 2008 - Economics and Philosophy 24 (3):381-406.
    We argue that neuroeconomics should be a mechanistic science. We defend this view as preferable both to a revolutionary perspective, according to which classical economics is eliminated in favour of neuroeconomics, and to a classical economic perspective, according to which economics is insulated from facts about psychology and neuroscience. We argue that, like other mechanistic sciences, neuroeconomics will earn its keep to the extent that it either reconfigures how economists think about decision-making or how neuroscientists think about brain mechanisms underlying (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   22 citations  
  • Modeling interventions in multi-level causal systems: supervenience, exclusion and underdetermination.James Woodward - 2022 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 12 (4):1-34.
    This paper explores some issues concerning how we should think about interventions (in the sense of unconfounded manipulations) of "upper-level" variables in contexts in which these supervene on but are not identical with lower-level realizers. It is argued that we should reject the demand that interventions on upper-level variables must leave their lower-level realizers unchanged– a requirement that within an interventionist framework would imply that upper-level variables are causally inert. Instead an intervention on an upper-level variable at the same time (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  • Minds and Machines Special Issue: Machine Learning: Prediction Without Explanation?F. J. Boge, P. Grünke & R. Hillerbrand - 2022 - Minds and Machines 32 (1):1-9.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  • Gestalt-Switching and the Evolutionary Transitions.Peter Godfrey-Smith & Benjamin Kerr - 2013 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 64 (1):205-222.
    Formal methods developed for modeling levels of selection problems have recently been applied to the investigation of major evolutionary transitions. We discuss two new tools of this kind. First, the ‘near-variant test’ can be used to compare the causal adequacy of predictively equivalent representations. Second, ‘state-variable gestalt-switching’ can be used to gain a useful dual perspective on evolutionary processes that involve both higher and lower level populations.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   13 citations  
  • The punctuated equilibrium of scientific change: a Bayesian network model.Patrick Grim, Frank Seidl, Calum McNamara, Isabell N. Astor & Caroline Diaso - 2022 - Synthese 200 (4):1-25.
    Our scientific theories, like our cognitive structures in general, consist of propositions linked by evidential, explanatory, probabilistic, and logical connections. Those theoretical webs ‘impinge on the world at their edges,’ subject to a continuing barrage of incoming evidence. Our credences in the various elements of those structures change in response to that continuing barrage of evidence, as do the perceived connections between them. Here we model scientific theories as Bayesian nets, with credences at nodes and conditional links between them modelled (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  • Intervening on structure.Daniel Malinsky - 2018 - Synthese 195 (5):2295-2312.
    Some explanations appeal to facts about the causal structure of a system in order to shed light on a particular phenomenon; these are explanations which do more than cite the causes X and Y of some state-of-affairs Z, but rather appeal to “macro-level” causal features—for example the fact that A causes B as well as C, or perhaps that D is a strong inhibitor of E—in order to explain Z. Appeals to these kinds of “macro-level” causal features appear in a (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   9 citations  
  • Causation: Determination and difference-making.Boris Kment - 2010 - Noûs 44 (1):80-111.
    Much of the modern philosophy of causation has been governed by two ideas: (i) causes make their effects inevitable; (ii) a cause is something that makes a difference to whether its effect occurs. I focus on explaining the origin of idea (ii) and its connection to (i). On my view, the frequent attempts to turn (ii) into an analysis of causation are wrongheaded. Patterns of difference-making aren't what makes causal claims true. They merely provide a useful test for causal claims. (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   13 citations  
  • Transitions in evolution: a formal analysis.Pierrick Bourrat - 2021 - Synthese 198 (4):3699-3731.
    Evolutionary transitions in individuality (ETIs) are events during which individuals at a given level of organization (particles) interact to form higher-level entities (collectives) which are then recognized as new individuals at that level. ETIs are intimately related to levels of selection, which, following Okasha, can be approached from two different perspectives. One, referred to as ‘synchronic’, asks whether selection occurs at the collective level while the partitioning of particles into collectives is taken for granted. The other, referred to as ‘diachronic’, (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   5 citations  
  • From causal models to counterfactual structures.Joseph Y. Halpern - 2013 - Review of Symbolic Logic 6 (2):305-322.
    Galles & Pearl (l998) claimed that s [possible-worlds] framework.s framework. Recursive models are shown to correspond precisely to a subclass of (possible-world) counterfactual structures. On the other hand, a slight generalization of recursive models, models where all equations have unique solutions, is shown to be incomparable in expressive power to counterfactual structures, despite the fact that the Galles and Pearl arguments should apply to them as well. The problem with the Galles and Pearl argument is identified: an axiom that they (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   15 citations  
  • A comparison of three Occam’s razors for Markovian causal models.Jiji Zhang - 2013 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 64 (2):423-448.
    The framework of causal Bayes nets, currently influential in several scientific disciplines, provides a rich formalism to study the connection between causality and probability from an epistemological perspective. This article compares three assumptions in the literature that seem to constrain the connection between causality and probability in the style of Occam's razor. The trio includes two minimality assumptions—one formulated by Spirtes, Glymour, and Scheines (SGS) and the other due to Pearl—and the more well-known faithfulness or stability assumption. In terms of (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   12 citations