Online research in philosophy

Nancy Cartwright’s most recent book, Hunting Causes and Using Them: Approaches to Philosophy and Economics (hereafter, HCUT), is a welcome and provocative addition to the current literature on causation. In HCUT, Cartwright further develops themes from her earlier work, especially Nature’s Capacities and their Measurement (1989) and The Dappled World (1999). One theme is that methodological issues having to with inferring and applying claims about cause and effect must be considered in tandem with metaphysical questions about what causation is. And with regard to the latter issue, Cartwright insists that causation is not just one kind of thing but is instead a general category for various types of processes that often differ in important ways. From these two themes, it naturally follows that one should be skeptical that there is any method of causal inference that is applicable in all cases. Moreover, for any method, one ought to be very clear about the types of causal systems for which it is suited and, of equal importance, those for which it is not. Given Cartwright’s approach, such investigations will require careful attention to domain specific detail about the nature of the causal processes of interest. Cartwright pursues these ideas in the context of critical examinations of current approaches to causation, including Bayes nets and several approaches proposed by econometricians. I am quite sympathetic to Cartwright’s overall perspective on causation, but I take issue with some of her characterizations of particular approaches and several of her specific claims about their limitations. I focus on Cartwright’s claims concerning methods of causal inference that rely on Bayes nets, which among the methods she discusses is the one I know best. First, I argue that Cartwright’s discussion of this topic 1 is problematic insofar as it does not pay adequate attention to the distinct projects that might be pursued within a Bayes nets approach to causation..

(No abstract is available for this citation).

Nancy Cartwright devotes half of her new book, Hunting Causes and Using Them, to critcizing "Bayes Net Methods"--as she calls them--and what she takes to be their assumptions. All of her critical claims are false or at best fractionally true. This paper reviews the literature she addresses but appears not to have met.

Hunting Causes and Using Them argues that causation is not one thing, as commonly assumed, but many. There is a huge variety of causal relations, each with different characterizing features, different methods for discovery and different uses to which it can be put. In this collection of new and previously published essays, Nancy Cartwright provides a critical survey of philosophical and economic literature on causality, with a special focus on the currently fashionable Bayes-nets and invariance methods – and it exposes a huge gap in that literature. Almost every account treats either exclusively how to hunt causes or how to use them. But where is the bridge between? It’s no good knowing how to warrant a causal claim if we don’t know what we can do with that claim once we have it. This book will interest philosophers, economists and social scientists.

(No abstract is available for this citation).