Abstract
This paper defends an interventionist account of causation by construing this account as a contribution to methodology, rather than as a set of theses about the ontology or metaphysics of causation. It also uses the topic of causation to raise some more general issues about the relation between, on the one hand, methodology, and, on the other hand, ontology and metaphysics, as these are understood in contemporary philosophical discussion, particularly among so-called analytic metaphysicians. It concludes with the suggestion that issues about the ontology of causation often can be fruitfully reconstrued as methodological proposals.
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Notes
An anonymous referee asks how methodology, as I conceive it, relates to epistemology. Since I am not an epistemologist, I hesitate to make claims about this matter, but insofar as the methodology of causal inference has to do with how one learns about or comes to know about causal claims, I suppose one might, if one wishes, think of this portion of methodology as in part a branch or subspecies of epistemology. However, as I try to make clear, methodology as I conceive it, also has to do with issues that at least some readers may not think of as squarely within the province of epistemology—e.g., issues having to do with conceptual clarification, with discovery and search strategies, and with the evaluation of reasoning patterns. (If one wants to think of these issues as part of epistemology as well, that is fine with me.) I will add that , as I think of it, methodology is not particularly concerned with many issues on which contemporary analytic epistemologists focus such as the explication of such ordinary language epistemic notions as “X knows that p” or the construction of responses to skepticism. In addition, methodology is, often at least, domain-specific in the sense that it operates with the assumption that the methods that are appropriate for learning about or reasoning with facts in one domain of inquiry may not carry over into investigations of other domains—for example, methods for testing non-causal statistical hypotheses are not identical with methods for causal inquiry and so on. So methodology often requires some degree of subject matter specific knowledge—it is not “theory of knowledge”, conceived of as general, domain-independent inquiry. I will also add that in my opinion the legitimacy of methodology as a subject of philosophical interest does not require that it be subsumed under or connected to the concerns of analytic epistemology.
See, e.g., Sider (2011) and Paul (2012), both of whom claim that ontological\(_{2}\) inquiry relies on the same methods as those allegedly employed in ordinary scientific research, such as appeals to “simplicity” and “inference to the best explanation”. Although I lack the space for discussion, I think that the ease with which these “methods” can be marshaled in defense of ontology\(_{2}\) is a reflection of the fact they do not adequately characterize what is distinctive about various forms of science. Real science relies on much more specific and constraining strategies for assessing evidential and explanatory import.
This is perhaps the appropriate place to address a possible misunderstanding that has surfaced when I have presented this material orally. I do not mean to claim that appeal to an interventionist framework is the only way of addressing methodological issues like those described above. I claim only that this framework provides \(a\) fruitful way of thinking about methodology. I do not consider it to be an objection to a methodological framework that there may be other frameworks that lead to similar or additional (but consistent) conclusions.
Or at least this is so to the extent that the demand for truth conditions or grounds is taken, as it commonly is by metaphysicians, to be the demand for an account of claims like (5.1) in terms of what is taken to be ontologically fundamental or primitive and some such. The category of what is ontologically fundamental or non-derivative may or may not make sense, but I assume that no one thinks that claims about hypothetical experiments are ontologically fundamental in the relevant sense. Thus Angrist and Pischke fail to provide truth conditions for causal claims in the metaphysician’s sense of truth conditions. Put slightly differently, if one accepts Angrist’s and Pischke’s gloss on (5.1) as illuminating, then what this suggests is that one can explicate or clarify the content of causal claims while failing to provide truth conditions in the metaphysician’s sense. The paragraphs that follow in the main text attempt to explain how this is possible.
Some may claim that such a manipulation would change the identity of the individual involved. This claim plays no role in the argument that follows.
An anonymous referee suggests that my remarks here amount to nothing more than the triviality that “you should be precise about which variables are the intended causal relata” and that this is something “you can endorse while denying interventionism in all of its forms.” I have tried to make it clear that interventionism goes beyond this triviality in providing at least some guidance about which variables are appropriate variables for causal relata, when variables should be regarded as defective or “imprecise” , and so on. I have tried to emphasize that this guidance is at least suggested by the basic commitments of interventionism. By way of contrast, the restrictions described above (that there should be a well-defined notion of manipulation associated with each variable) does not follow as naturally from various other accounts of causation. For example, it seems perfectly possible for a Lewisian to introduce a “miracle” that changes someone’s gender, gender can be an INUS condition for some outcome etc. I will also add that in general I do not think that it is good enough in formulating causal claims to be “precise” about which variables are involved. This is partly because one needs to be “precise” in the right way but also because even precise variables can be defective in other ways. There are a number of other plausible criteria governing variable choice besides the one mentioned the text above, some of which are discussed (in some cases with an interventionist motivation) in Woodward, forthcoming b.
Thus in thinking of (M) in this way, we are not construing it as a purely descriptive claim about what people always or usually have immediately in mind when they make causal claims—we are not claiming that they always associate causal claims with hypothetical experiments and so on. On the contrary, we recognize that they often do not spontaneously make this association, but argue that they ought to, as a way of making causal claims more clear and precise.
Again drawn from (Angrist and Pischke 2009, pp. 6–7).
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A version of this paper was given as a talk at a conference on “Causation: New Prospects” at the Collège de France in December, 2013. I am grateful to the participants in the conference and especially Chris Hitchock, Huw Price, and Claudine Tiercelin for helpful comments.
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Woodward, J. Methodology, ontology, and interventionism. Synthese 192, 3577–3599 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-014-0479-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-014-0479-1