Posted in Causation, Counterfactuals, Explanation on Feb 20th, 2010
I am re-reading the chapters devoted to causal explanation of Woodward's Making Things Happen: A theory of causal explanation. The book is very interesting and ambitious and probably Woodward is offering there one of the most complete and attractive theories of causal explanation available today. I am sympathetic to some of the main ideas. The [...]
A nice discussion over at Junk Charts about the “Climategate” scandal, which boils down to a self-inflicted wound from speaking too loosely about scaling time series data.
Posted in Causation on Jul 12th, 2009
At Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science, Andrew Gelman has a very nice discussion about differences between Pearl and Rubin’s approach to causal statistical modeling. The discussion ranges over four recent posts (the first; the second; the third, which clarifies some issues raised in the first two; and the fourth (so far), which continues the discussion from the first [...]
Posted in Causation, Counterfactuals on Apr 24th, 2009
I’ve always thought that causal modeling provided a neat way of cashing out the concept of the selection function in Stalnaker’s semantics for counterfactuals. Suppose the antecedent of a counterfactual is a value assignment to a variable, or a conjunction of value assignments to variables. Then relative to a causal model , the closest worlds [...]
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