Abstract
In recent years, ever-advancing technological possibilities have allowed for more and more complex experimental setups. With this increase in complexity, the establishment of clear definitions and guidelines for what causal inferences can safely be drawn from these experiments is of crucial importance. One of the aims of the philosophical treatment of causality and causal explanation is exactly this: to provide clear-cut boundaries for legitimate causal inferences. However, in order to be helpful for experimental scientists, purely philosophical accounts of causal explanations need to be verified by the respective field of research and should not be naive to well-established and widely-acknowledged experimental practice. Apart from the obvious need for logical validity of these accounts, this verifiability is an important additional criterion of evaluation. This chapter will take a first step into this direction by evaluating different approaches towards causal explanations with regard to the research field of psychophysics and overt visual attention (eye-tracking).
Keywords
- Philosophical Account
- Causal Explanation
- Scientific Practice
- Overt Visual Attention
- Complex Experimental Setup
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- 1.
Definitions taken from Woodward (2003)
References
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Acknowledgements
The author wants to thank Achim Stephan and Vera Hoffmann-Kolss for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this manuscript.
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Kietzmann, T.C. (2012). Philosophical Accounts of Causal Explanation and the Scientific Practice of Psychophysics. In: de Regt, H., Hartmann, S., Okasha, S. (eds) EPSA Philosophy of Science: Amsterdam 2009. The European Philosophy of Science Association Proceedings, vol 1. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-2404-4_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-2404-4_11
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