Abstract
Woodward’s interventionist theory of causation is beset by a problem of circularity: the analysis of causes is in terms of interventions, and the analysis of interventions is in terms of causes. This is not in itself an argument against the correctness of the analysis. But by requiring us to have causal knowledge prior to making any judgements about causation, Woodward’s theory does make it mysterious how we can ever start acquiring causal knowledge. We present a solution to this problem by showing how the interventionist notion of causation can be rationally generated from a more primitive agency notion of causation. The agency notion is easily and non-circularly applicable, but fails when we attempt to capture causal relations between non-actions. We show that the interventionist notion of causation serves as an appropriate generalisation of the agency notion. Furthermore, the causal judgements based on the latter generally remain true when rephrased in terms of the former, which allows one to use the causal knowledge gained by applying the agency notion as a basis for applying Woodward’s interventionist theory. We then present an overview of relevant empirical evidence from developmental psychology which shows that our proposed rational reconstruction lines up neatly with the actual development of causal reasoning in children. This gives additional plausibility to our proposal. The article thus provides a solution to one of the main problems of interventionism while keeping Woodward’s analysis intact.
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Notes
Throughout this paper, we will assume that analyses of the concept of causation can be ranked as better and worse on pragmatic grounds, without the need for a theory-neutral set of intuitions underlying them. We also assume that it is possible to see intellectual progress from a worse to a better theory from a purely internal perspective, without the need for a further point of view that is neutral with respect to the two theories. A defence of these assumptions falls outside the scope of the current paper.
We are not committing ourselves to Bayesianism here: other theories of confirmation would yield the same verdict.
From an anthropological perspective, one can speculate that animism—the ascription of personhood to natural objects—is the temporary result of such a development, where causation has been placed outside of human actions, but has not yet lost its connection to action completely. We are not competent to develop this suggestion.
The difference between perceiving correlations between external events (stage i) and understanding \(\hbox {causal}_{1}\) relations between another agent’s actions and their effects (stage ii) resembles the difference between classical and instrumental conditioning. In classical conditioning, the agent learns about a predictive relation between two events that are outside of her control, whereas in instrumental conditioning what is learned is a predictive relation between an action of the agent and its effect. Woodward (2007) argues that, from an interventionist perspective, instrumental learning has a ‘cause-like’ flavor. Although we agree that instrumental learning has this cause-like flavor, we think this is better explained using an agency perspective on causation.
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Acknowledgments
We would like to thank two anonymous referees, Lena Kästner, and Markus Eronen for their valuable comments and suggestions. We would also like to thank the audience of the Zentrum für interdisziplinäre Forschung workshop ‘Agents and Causes’, and the HPS group of Leiden University’s Institute of Philosophy, for their feedback on a related paper presentation.
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Gijsbers, V., de Bruin, L. How agency can solve interventionism’s problem of circularity. Synthese 191, 1775–1791 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-013-0366-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-013-0366-1