Host Specificity in Biological Control
In recent years the notion of biological specificity has attracted significant philosophical attention. This paper focuses on host specificity, a kind of biological specificity …
Thomas Blanchard
Maître de Conférences en Philosophie
Université Bordeaux Montaigne
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SPH (Sciences, Philosophie, Humanités) — EA 4574
I am Associate Professor in the philosophy department at the Université Bordeaux Montaigne. Previously, I was a postdoctoral researcher in philosophy and psychology in the Concepts and Cognition Lab at UC-Berkeley for the Varieties of Understanding Project, an Assistant Professor at Illinois Wesleyan University, and an Akademischer Rat (roughly equivalent to assistant professor) at the University of Cologne. I received my Ph.D. from Rutgers University in 2014.
My research is in the philosophy of science, and focuses mainly on causation, causal modeling and causal explanation. I am interested in a wide variety of issues concerning causation including causal asymmetries, levels of causal explanation, the causal exclusion problem, the epistemology of causal inference, causal cognition, and causal decision theory. My work also investigates the use of certain causal concepts and assumptions in particular sciences such as biology, epidemiology and medicine.
Causation and the Time-Asymmetry of Knowledge
This paper argues that the knowledge asymmetry (the fact that we know more about the past than the future) can be explained as a consequence of the causal Markov condition. The …
Causal Modeling in Multilevel Settings: A New Proposal
An important question for the causal modeling approach is how to integrate non-causal dependence relations such as asymmetric supervenience into the approach. The most prominent …
The Causal Efficacy of Composites: A Dilemma for Interventionism
This paper argues that the interventionist account of causation faces a dilemma concerning macroscopic causation – i.e., causation by composite objects. Interventionism must either …
Best-System Laws, Explanation, and Unification
In recent years, an active research program has emerged that aims to develop a Humean best-system account (BSA) of laws of nature that improves on Lewis's canonical articulation of …
Specificity of Association in Epidemiology
The epidemiologist Bradford Hill famously argued that in epidemiology, specificity of association (roughly, the fact that an environmental or behavioral risk factor is associated …
Experiments on Causal Exclusion
Intuitions play an important role in the debate on the causal status of high-level properties. For instance, Kim has claimed that his 'exclusion argument' relies on 'a perfectly …
Explanatory Abstraction and the Goldilocks Problem: Interventionism Gets Things Just Right
Theories of explanation need to account for a puzzling feature of our explanatory practices: the fact that we prefer explanations that are relatively abstract but only moderately …
Stable Causal Relationships Are Better Causal Relationships
We report three experiments investigating whether people's judgments about causal relationships are sensitive to the robustness or stability of such relationships across a range of …
Stability, Breadth and Guidance
Much recent work on explanation in the interventionist tradition emphasizes the explanatory value of stable causal generalizations. We argue that two separate explanatory virtues …