18 found
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  1. Cause without Default.Thomas Blanchard & Jonathan Schaffer - 2017 - In Helen Beebee, Christopher Hitchcock & Huw Price (eds.), Making a Difference: Essays on the Philosophy of Causation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 175-214.
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  2. Explanatory Abstraction and the Goldilocks Problem: Interventionism Gets Things Just Right.Thomas Blanchard - 2020 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 71 (2):633-663.
    Theories of explanation need to account for a puzzling feature of our explanatory practices: the fact that we prefer explanations that are relatively abstract but only moderately so. Contra Franklin-Hall ([2016]), I argue that the interventionist account of explanation provides a natural and elegant explanation of this fact. By striking the right balance between specificity and generality, moderately abstract explanations optimally subserve what interventionists regard as the goal of explanation, namely identifying possible interventions that would have changed the explanandum.
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  3. Stability, breadth and guidance.Thomas Blanchard, Nadya Vasilyeva & Tania Lombrozo - 2018 - Philosophical Studies 175 (9):2263-2283.
    Much recent work on explanation in the interventionist tradition emphasizes the explanatory value of stable causal generalizations—i.e., causal generalizations that remain true in a wide range of background circumstances. We argue that two separate explanatory virtues are lumped together under the heading of `stability’. We call these two virtues breadth and guidance respectively. In our view, these two virtues are importantly distinct, but this fact is neglected or at least under-appreciated in the literature on stability. We argue that an adequate (...)
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  4.  68
    Stable Causal Relationships Are Better Causal Relationships.Nadya Vasilyeva, Thomas Blanchard & Tania Lombrozo - 2018 - Cognitive Science 42 (4):1265-1296.
    We report three experiments investigating whether people’s judgments about causal relationships are sensitive to the robustness or stability of such relationships across a range of background circumstances. In Experiment 1, we demonstrate that people are more willing to endorse causal and explanatory claims based on stable (as opposed to unstable) relationships, even when the overall causal strength of the relationship is held constant. In Experiment 2, we show that this effect is not driven by a causal generalization’s actual scope of (...)
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  5. Experiments on causal exclusion.Thomas Blanchard, Dylan Murray & Tania Lombrozo - 2022 - Mind and Language 37 (5):1067-1089.
    Intuitions play an important role in the debate on the causal status of high‐level properties. For instance, Kim has claimed that his “exclusion argument” relies on “a perfectly intuitive … understanding of the causal relation.” We report the results of three experiments examining whether laypeople really have the relevant intuitions. We find little support for Kim's view and the principles on which it relies. Instead, we find that laypeople are willing to count both a multiply realized property and its realizers (...)
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  6.  84
    Bayesian Occam's Razor Is a Razor of the People.Thomas Blanchard, Tania Lombrozo & Shaun Nichols - 2018 - Cognitive Science 42 (4):1345-1359.
    Occam's razor—the idea that all else being equal, we should pick the simpler hypothesis—plays a prominent role in ordinary and scientific inference. But why are simpler hypotheses better? One attractive hypothesis known as Bayesian Occam's razor is that more complex hypotheses tend to be more flexible—they can accommodate a wider range of possible data—and that flexibility is automatically penalized by Bayesian inference. In two experiments, we provide evidence that people's intuitive probabilistic and explanatory judgments follow the prescriptions of BOR. In (...)
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  7. Physics and Causation.Thomas Blanchard - 2016 - Philosophy Compass 11 (5):256-266.
    More than a century ago, Russell launched a forceful attack on causation, arguing not only that modern physics has no need for causal notions but also that our belief in causation is a relic of a pre-scientific view of the world. He thereby initiated a debate about the relations between physics and causation that remains very much alive today. While virtually everybody nowadays rejects Russell's causal eliminativism, many philosophers have been convinced by Russell that the fundamental physical structure of our (...)
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  8.  50
    The causal efficacy of composites: a dilemma for interventionism.Thomas Blanchard - 2023 - Philosophical Studies 180 (9):2685-2706.
    This paper argues that the interventionist account of causation faces a dilemma concerning macroscopic causation – i.e., causation by composite objects. Interventionism must either require interventions on a composite object to hold the behavior of its parts fixed, or allow such interventions to vary the behavior of those parts. The first option runs the risk of making wholes causally excluded by their parts, while the second runs the risk of mistakenly ascribing to wholes causal abilities that belong to their parts (...)
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  9. Bayesianism and Explanatory Unification: A Compatibilist Account.Thomas Blanchard - 2018 - Philosophy of Science 85 (4):682-703.
    Proponents of IBE claim that the ability of a hypothesis to explain a range of phenomena in a unifying way contributes to the hypothesis’s credibility in light of these phenomena. I propose a Bayesian justification of this claim that reveals a hitherto unnoticed role for explanatory unification in evaluating the plausibility of a hypothesis: considerations of explanatory unification enter into the determination of a hypothesis’s prior by affecting its ‘explanatory coherence’, that is, the extent to which the hypothesis offers mutually (...)
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  10. Best-System Laws, Explanation, and Unification.Thomas Blanchard - 2023 - In Christian Loew, Siegfried Jaag & Michael Townsen Hicks (eds.), Humean Laws for Human Agents. Oxford: Oxford UP.
    In recent years, an active research program has emerged that aims to develop a Humean best-system account (BSA) of laws of nature that improves on Lewis’s canonical articulation of the view. Its guiding idea is that the laws are cognitive tools tailored to the specific needs and limitations of creatures like us. While current versions of this “pragmatic Humean” research program fare much better than Lewis’s account along many dimensions, I will argue that they have trouble making sense of certain (...)
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  11.  30
    Host Specificity in Biological Control.Thomas Blanchard - forthcoming - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science.
    In recent years the notion of biological specificity has attracted significant philosophical attention. This paper focuses on host specificity, a kind of biological specificity that has not yet been discussed by philosophers, and which concerns the extent to which a species is selective in the range of other species it exploits for feeding and/or reproduction. Host specificity is an important notion in ecology, where it plays a variety of theoretical roles. Here I focus on the role of host specificity in (...)
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  12.  85
    Causal modeling in multilevel settings: A new proposal.Thomas Blanchard & Andreas Hüttemann - 2024 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 109 (2):433-457.
    An important question for the causal modeling approach is how to integrate non‐causal dependence relations such as asymmetric supervenience into the approach. The most prominent proposal to that effect (due to Gebharter) is to treat those dependence relationships as formally analogous to causal relationships. We argue that this proposal neglects some crucial differences between causal and non‐causal dependencies, and that in the context of causal modeling non‐causal dependence relationships should be represented as mutual dependence relationships. We develop a new kind (...)
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  13. Specificity of association in epidemiology.Thomas Blanchard - 2022 - Synthese 200 (6).
    The epidemiologist Bradford Hill famously argued that in epidemiology, specificity of association (roughly, the fact that an environmental or behavioral risk factor is associated with just one or at most a few medical outcomes) is strong evidence of causation. Prominent epidemiologists have dismissed Hill’s claim on the ground that it relies on a dubious `one-cause one effect’ model of disease causation. The paper examines this methodological controversy, and argues that specificity considerations do have a useful role to play in causal (...)
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  14.  34
    Causation and the Time-Asymmetry of Knowledge.Thomas Blanchard - 2024 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 102 (4):959-977.
    This paper argues that the knowledge asymmetry (the fact that we know more about the past than the future) can be explained as a consequence of the causal Markov condition. The causal Markov condition implies that causes of a common effect are generally statistically independent, whereas effects of a common cause are generally correlated. I show that together with certain facts about the physics of our world, the statistical independence of causes severely limits our ability to predict the future, whereas (...)
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  15.  34
    Default knowledge, time pressure, and the theory-theory of concepts.Thomas Blanchard - 2010 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 33 (2-3):206-207.
    I raise two issues for Machery's discussion and interpretation of the theory-theory. First, I raise an objection against Machery's claim that theory-theorists take theories to be default bodies of knowledge. Second, I argue that theory-theorists' experimental results do not support Machery's contention that default bodies of knowledge include theories used in their own proprietary kind of categorization process.
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  16.  32
    Moral Responsibility and the Self.Thomas Blanchard - unknown
    Moral responsibility is an issue at the heart of the free-will debate. The question of how we can have moral responsibility in a deterministic world is an interesting and puzzling one. Compatibilists arguments have left open the possibility that the ability to do otherwise is not required for moral responsibility. The challenge, then, is to come up with what our attributions of moral responsibility are tracking. To do this, criteria which can adequately differentiate cases in which the agent is responsible (...)
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  17.  90
    How Physics Makes Us Free. [REVIEW]Thomas Blanchard - 2017 - Journal of Philosophy 114 (3):160-164.
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  18.  83
    Douglas Kutach: Causation and Its Basis in Fundamental Physics. [REVIEW]Thomas Blanchard - 2015 - Philosophy of Science 82 (2):330-333,.
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