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  1. On the unity between observational and experimental causal discovery.Jiji Zhang - 2022 - Theoria. An International Journal for Theory, History and Foundations of Science 37 (1):63-74.
    In “Flagpoles anyone? Causal and explanatory asymmetries”, James Woodward supplements his celebrated interventionist account of causation and explanation with a set of new ideas about causal and explanatory asymmetries, which he extracts from some cutting-edge methods for causal discovery from observational data. Among other things, Woodward draws interesting connections between observational causal discovery and interventionist themes that are inspired in the first place by experimental causal discovery, alluding to a sort of unity between observational and experimental causal discovery. In this (...)
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  • Computational causal discovery: Advantages and assumptions.Kun Zhang - 2022 - Theoria. An International Journal for Theory, History and Foundations of Science 37 (1):75-86.
    I would like to congratulate James Woodward for another landmark accomplishment, after publishing his Making things happen: A theory of causal explanation. Making things happen gives an elegant interventionist theory for understanding explanation and causation. The new contribution relies on that theory and further makes a big step towards empirical inference of causal relations from non-experimental data. In this paper, I will focus on some of the emerging computational methods for finding causal relations from non-experimental data and attempt to complement (...)
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  • The fate of causal structure under time reversal.Porter Williams - 2022 - Theoria. An International Journal for Theory, History and Foundations of Science 37 (1):87-102.
    What happens to the causal structure of a world when time is reversed? At first glance it seems there are two possible answers: the causal relations are reversed, or they are not. I argue that neither of these answers is correct: we should either deny that time-reversed worlds have causal relations at all, or deny that causal concepts developed in the actual world are reliable guides to the causal structure of time-reversed worlds. The first option is motivated by the instability (...)
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  • Entanglement, Complexity, and Causal Asymmetry in Quantum Theories.Porter Williams - 2022 - Foundations of Physics 52 (2):1-38.
    It is often claimed that one cannot locate a notion of causation in fundamental physical theories. The reason most commonly given is that the dynamics of those theories do not support any distinction between the past and the future, and this vitiates any attempt to locate a notion of causal asymmetry—and thus of causation—in fundamental physical theories. I argue that this is incorrect: the ubiquitous generation of entanglement between quantum systems grounds a relevant asymmetry in the dynamical evolution of quantum (...)
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  • Intervening and Letting Go: On the Adequacy of Equilibrium Causal Models.Naftali Weinberger - 2021 - Erkenntnis 88 (6):2467-2491.
    Causal representations are distinguished from non-causal ones by their ability to predict the results of interventions. This widely-accepted view suggests the following adequacy condition for causal models: a causal model is adequate only if it does not contain variables regarding which it makes systematically false predictions about the results of interventions. Here I argue that this condition should be rejected. For a class of equilibrium systems, there will be two incompatible causal models depending on whether one intervenes upon a certain (...)
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  • Bi-directionality and time in causal relationships.Fernanda Samaniego - 2022 - Theoria. An International Journal for Theory, History and Foundations of Science 37 (1).
    This paper aims to provide an answer to James Woodward’s article “Flagpoles anyone? Causal and explanatory asymmetries”. It will be conjectured that, when causal directionality depends on the experimental design, it is because the variables involved are capable of producing changes in each other. This will be exemplified using the case of ideal gases as opposed to the flagpole-shadow scenario.
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  • Some Explanatory Issues with Woodward’s Notion of Intervention.Dalibor Makovník - 2023 - International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 36 (4):299-315.
    James Woodward’s manipulationist counterfactual theory of explanation offers strong tools for an adequate approach to explanation endeavours. One of these tools is the notion of intervention, which serves as a guiding principle for identifying explanations as causal, thus preserving the unidirectionality of explanatory praxis. Nevertheless, in this paper, I argue that in some cases of explanation, this notion has a rather redundant role since it is either impossible to define or it can be replaced by other types of manipulations or (...)
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  • Scientific Explanation as a Guide to Ground.Markel Kortabarria & Joaquim Giannotti - 2024 - Synthese 203 (3):1-27.
    Ground is all the rage in contemporary metaphysics. But what is its nature? Some metaphysicians defend what we could call, following Skiles and Trogdon (2021), the inheritance view: it is because constitutive forms of metaphysical explanation are such-and-such that we should believe that ground is so-and-so. However, many putative instances of inheritance are not primarily motivated by scientific considerations. This limitation is harmless if one thinks that ground and science are best kept apart. Contrary to this view, we believe that (...)
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