Abstract

Although statistical techniques like regression analysis and path analysis are widely used in the biomedical, behavioral and social sciences to make causal inferences there has been surprisingly little philosophical discussion of the details of such techniques and of the conceptions of causation and explanation implicit in them. There also has been relatively little attempt to compare such techniques with various probabilistic models of causation and explanation in the philosophical literature.In this paper I explore, for reasons of space in a very sketchy and schematic way, some issues in philosophy of science raised by regression analysis. One general conclusion I reach is that it is considerably less obvious than one might suppose that the philosophical theories alluded to above are plausibly viewed as reconstructions of regression techniques.