Online research in philosophy

This paper presents the econometric approach to causal modeling. It is motivated by policy problems. New causal parameters are defined and identified to address specific policy problems. Economists embrace a scientific approach to causality and model the preferences and choices of agents to infer subjective (agent) evaluations as well as objective outcomes. Anticipated and realized subjective and objective outcomes are distinguished. Models for simultaneous causality are developed. The paper contrasts the Neyman-Rubin model of causality with the econometric approach.

I put forward several desiderata that a philosophical theory of causality should satisfy: it should account for the objectivity of causality, it should underpin formalisms for causal reasoning, it should admit a viable epistemology, it should be able to cope with the great variety of causal claims that are made, and it should be ontologically parsimonious. I argue that Nancy Cartwright’s dispositional account of causality goes part way towards meeting these criteria but is lacking in important respects. I go on to argue that my epistemic account, which ties causal relationships to an agent’s knowledge and ignorance, performs well in the light of the desiderata. Such an account, I claim, is all we require from a theory of causality.

According to a classical teaching, God is not really related to creatures even by virtue of creating them. Some have objected that this teaching makes unintelligible the claim that God causally accounts for the universe, since God would be the same whether the universe existed or not. I defend the classical teaching, showing how the doctrine is implied by a popular cosmological argument, showing that the objection to it would also rule out libertarian agent causality, and showing that the objection rests on an account of causality and sufficient reason that we have good reason to reject. (Published Online January 15 2007).

By setting out the grammar of event causality, as developed by Hume and Mackie, in contrast to the grammar of agent causality in the natural sciences, a kind of hybrid hierarchical format for chemical explanations is sketched. From this starting point the history of agentive concepts in chemistry is displayed as a progression from Newton’s ‘forces’, through the nineteenth century concepts of ‘affinity’ and ‘valency’ to recent theories of molecular binding in terms of the migration of electrons and protons as powerful particulars. The final stage of this development is the rewriting of chemical theory in terms of energy.