Causal assessment is the problem of establishing whether a relation between (variable) X and (variable) Y is causal. This problem, to be sure, is widespread across the sciences. According to accredited positions in the philosophy of causality and in social science methodology, invariance under intervention provides the most reliable test to decide whether X causes Y. This account of invariance (under intervention) has been criticised, among other reasons, because it makes manipulations on the putative causal factor fundamental for the causal (...) methodology; consequently, the argument goes, the account is ill-suited to those contexts where manipulations are not performed, for instance, the social sciences. The article aims to extend the account of invariance (under intervention), in a way that manipulations on the putative causal factors are not methodologically fundamental, and yet invariance remains key for causal assessment both in experimental and non-experimental contexts. (shrink)

The interventionist account of causal explanation, in the version presented by Jim Woodward, has been recently claimed capable of buttressing the widely felt—though poorly understood—hunch that high-level, relatively abstract explanations, of the sort provided by sciences like biology, psychology and economics, are in some cases explanatorily optimal. It is the aim of this paper to show that this is mistaken. Due to a lack of effective constraints on the causal variables at the heart of the interventionist causal-explanatory scheme, as presently (...) formulated it is either unable to prefer high-level explanations to low, or systematically overshoots, recommending explanations at so high of a level as to be virtually vacuous. (shrink)

An interventionist account of causation characterizes causal relations in terms of changes resulting from particular interventions. I provide a new example of a causal relation for which there does not exist an intervention satisfying the common interventionist standard. I consider adaptations that would save this standard and describe their implications for an interventionist account of causation. No adaptation preserves all the aspects that make the interventionist account appealing. Part of the fallout is a clearer account of the difficulties in characterizing (...) so-called “soft” interventions. (shrink)

The first part of this paper argues that if Craver’s ([2007a], [2007b]) popular mutual manipulability account (MM) of mechanistic constitution is embedded within Woodward’s ([2003]) interventionist theory of causation--for which it is explicitly designed--it either undermines the mechanistic research paradigm by entailing that there do not exist relationships of constitutive relevance or it gives rise to the unwanted consequence that constitution is a form of causation. The second part shows how Woodward’s theory can be adapted in such a way that (...) (MM) neither undermines the mechanistic paradigm nor reduces constitution to causation. However, it turns out that this modified theoretical embedding of (MM) makes it impossible to produce empirical evidence for constitutive relations. The paper ends by suggesting an additional criterion, the fat-handedness criterion, which, when combined with (MM), generates indirect empirical evidence for constitutive relevance. (shrink)