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 …
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 …
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 …
La causalité