Abstract
“Coupled human and natural systems” (CHANS) has emerged within the last two decades as a designation for interdisciplinary research focused on complex interactions between human activities and ecosystems. I examine CHANS from a manipulation approach to explanation advocated by Jim Woodward, according to which causal generalizations are distinguished by being invariant under interventions. Several philosophers object that causal generalizations about complex social and biological systems, such as CHANS, often fail to be invariant. This chapter develops the concept of a robust intervention to answer this objection, where an intervention is robust to the extent that its ability to promote the intended result is insensitive to errors in the causal model. However, this necessitates rethinking the concept of intervention used by Woodward. Whereas Woodward’s concept requires that interventions be exogenous, robust interventions are often non-exogenous insofar as involving a sequence of actions wherein later choices are conditional on the results of prior ones. I explain how robust interventions are related to adaptive policies, often discussed in relation to CHANS.
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Notes
- 1.
A similar error occurs in Craver’s (2007, p. 96) adaptation of Woodward’s definition of intervention (although Craver reorders Woodward’s four criteria, so Craver’s I3 corresponds to Woodward’s I4).
- 2.
Given Pearl’s concept of d-separation (2009, pp. 16–17), I4* could be equivalently stated as I d-separates Y from the parents of I.
- 3.
Indeed, Woodward does not even require that the intervention be physically possible (Woodward 2003, pp. 127–133).
- 4.
For example, thresholds can result in counterexamples to the commonly made assumption that if X is a cause of Y, then X and Y are probabilistically dependent (see Neopolitan 2004, p. 99).
- 5.
- 6.
For more on robustness and decision making, see Lempert et al. 2003, 2006; Popper et al. 2005. Several philosophers have also provided accounts of the notion of robustness (e.g., Henderson and Horgan 2001; Woodward 2006), but not to my knowledge in relation to robust interventions, which is the focus here.
- 7.
Pearl’s interpretation of structural models, therefore, presumes determinism. However, it is possible to interpret structural equations in a manner that does not require this assumption (see Steel 2005).
- 8.
Recall that Pearl’s atomic interventions differ from Woodward’s interventions only in not necessarily being exogenous.
- 9.
Woodward critiques the notion of a “ceteris paribus law” and suggests that it can be replaced by his concept of an invariant generalization (Woodward 2002). As should be clear from this section, I regard that position as a mistake.
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Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Jim Woodward for helpful correspondence, and Lindley Darden and other members of the University of Maryland philosophy department for helpful comments on an earlier draft.
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Steel, D. (2014). Explanation and Intervention in Coupled Human and Natural Systems. In: Kaiser, M.I., Scholz, O.R., Plenge, D., Hüttemann, A. (eds) Explanation in the Special Sciences. Synthese Library, vol 367. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-7563-3_15
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