Abstract
This article is an attempt to provide an example that illustrates Hans Reichenbach’s concept of coordination. Throughout Reichenbach’s career the concept of coordination played an important role in his understanding of the connection between reality and how it is scientifically described. Reichenbach never fully specified what coordination is and how exactly it works. Instead, we are left with a variety of hints and gestures, many not entirely consistent with each other and several that are subject to change over the course of his career. Using the example of how to discover and construct causal variables, I will show that most of the features of coordination that Reichenbach described can be instantiated together and formulated precisely.
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Notes
Even though I think this would be a rather significant difference between interventionist and non-interventionist accounts of causation, I am not aware of any discussion of this problem in any of the non-interventionist accounts.
See Gofman et al. (1950), thanks to https://medium.com/@kshithappens/ambiguous-manipulations-8a06b9f62e53 for the pointer.
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Eberhardt, F. A contemporary example of Reichenbachian coordination. Synthese 200, 90 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-022-03571-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-022-03571-8