Causation with a Human Face

Download or read book Causation with a Human Face written by James Woodward and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021 with total page 425 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The past few decades have seen an explosion of research on causal reasoning in philosophy, computer science, and statistics, as well as descriptive research in psychology about how people reason about causes. Causation with a Human Face integrates these lines of research and argues for an understanding of how each can inform the other: normative ideas can suggest interesting experiments, while descriptive results can suggest important normative concepts. Woodward's overall framework builds on an interventionist treatment of causation, and discusses proposals about the role of invariant or stable relationships in successful causal reasoning and the notion of proportionality. He argues that these normative ideas are reflected in the causal judgments that people actually make as a descriptive matter.