Review of Philosophy and Psychology 8 (2):273-294 (2017)
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Abstract |
In the last decade, several researchers have proposed theories of actual causation that make use of structural equations and directed graphs. Many of these researchers are committed to a widely-endorsed folk attribution desideratum, according to which an important constraint on the acceptability of a theory of actual causation is agreement between the deliverances of the theory with respect to specific cases and the reports of untutored individuals about those same cases. In the present article, we consider a small collection of related theories of actual causation, including a purely structural theory and two theories that supplement the structural equations with considerations of defaults, typicality, and normality. We argue that each of these three theories are meant to satisfy the FAD, and then we present empirical evidence that they fail to do so for several variations on a simple scenario from the literature. Drawing on our previous work on the responsibility view of folk causal attribitons, we conclude by offering a solution that allows the latter two theories to satisfy the FAD for these cases. The solution is to give up on concerns with typicality and focus on injunctive norms in supplementing the graphical modeling machinery.
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Keywords | Causation |
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Reprint years | 2017 |
DOI | 10.1007/s13164-016-0316-1 |
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References found in this work BETA
Making Things Happen: A Theory of Causal Explanation.James Woodward - 2003 - Oxford University Press.
Cause and Norm.Christopher Hitchcock & Joshua Knobe - 2009 - Journal of Philosophy 106 (11):587-612.
The Theory and Practice of Experimental Philosophy.Justin Sytsma & Jonathan Livengood - 2015 - Broadview Press.
View all 24 references / Add more references
Citations of this work BETA
Norms Affect Prospective Causal Judgments.Paul Henne, Kevin O’Neill, Paul Bello, Sangeet Khemlani & Felipe De Brigard - 2021 - Cognitive Science 45 (1):e12931.
Actual Causation and Compositionality.Jonathan Livengood & Justin Sytsma - 2020 - Philosophy of Science 87 (1):43-69.
Two Types of Typicality: Rethinking the Role of Statistical Typicality in Ordinary Causal Attributions.Justin Sytsma, Jonathan Livengood & David Rose - 2012 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 43 (4):814-820.
Immoral Professors and Malfunctioning Tools: Counterfactual Relevance Accounts Explain the Effect of Norm Violations on Causal Selection.Jonathan F. Kominsky & Jonathan Phillips - 2019 - Cognitive Science 43 (11).
View all 14 citations / Add more citations
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