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 [...]

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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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