Single Review on past events

Julian Reiss, Mentor of Associated Fellow Tobias Henschen, was invited to present his research at a Jour Fixe. He talked about “Cause, Causatives, and Theories of Causation” and addressed his main concern: Provide a satisfactory account of causation in the sciences. His work focuses on the biomedical and social sciences, taking a closer look at the causal language that is employed in science.

Instead of starting with metaphysical intuitions and policing what scientists say according to a priori principles, Reiss proposes to take the language scientists employ at face value and developing a philosophical theory from there. His specific target are attempts to explicate causation by means of the expression “C causes E iff ‘…’” — theories to which he refers as “Straightjacket Theories of Causation”. Straightjacket theories have difficulty making sense three features of scientific language: Indispensability of Causatives, Metaphysical Anarchy, and Polysemy. The first means that scientific language is full of causatives such as push, bond, attract, crunch, but it seems not clear that you can always translate these into “cause + x”. Therefore, straightjacket theories cannot account for the large majority of causal claims in science. Metaphysical Anarchy means that scientific language is extremely flexible with respect to the “C’s” and “E’s” that are being causally related or indeed with respect to what is represented by a causal claim. According to Julian Reiss a theory of causation must be a theory of causal claims. The third feature says that causatives are polysemous. What they mean depends on context. Therefore a theory of causation should be a theory of causal claims in a context.

Considering all these features Julian Reiss opts for an alternative, namely inferentialism. He argues: “Causation and inference are clearly related. Causal claims, in conjunction with other knowledge such as observations, license inferences to future and past states of affairs. Observations, in conjunction with background knowledge, license inferences to causal claims. The content of a causal claim is given by the set of propositions from which it follows and those which follow from it. “

Inferential systems consist of an inferential base (essentially, the evidence – RCTs, controlled experiments, statements describing experimental design, observational studies, statements describing how confounders and biases are ruled out, background knowledge etc.), inferential targets (which account for the fact that causal claims are rarely established for their own sake, but rather, for their ‘cash value’: explanations, attributions of blame and praise, predictions, propositions about effective strategies), and the causal claim itself. To determine the content of a causal claim, you have to ask: What is its inferential system? He gave an example: The inferential system of the sentence “Billy’s throw caused the iPad to shatter” (in a context when the iPad would have shattered anyway because of Suzy’s throw) consists of: critical observation as inferential base, which means observation plus critical background — assumptions that are contextually justified and claims such as “Billy’s throw explains the shattering” and “It was Billy’s fault” in the inferential target. Importantly, there is no counterfactual statement such as “Had Billy not thrown, the iPad wouldn’t have shattered” in the inferential target because we are entitled to infer this claim only in contexts when there are no backup causes.

He concluded his talk by summarizing how the inferential account deals with the three features about causal language in science. 1. Indispensability of Causatives: It makes no difference between sentences in which “cause” appears and those in which it doesn’t. For any sentence in a scientific publication we can ask what the inferential system for this sentence is. Neither does “cause” vs. causative make a principled difference, nor whether the sentence is a causal claim at all. 2. Metaphysical Anarchy: As causation has to do with our reasoning practices and not with what the world is like, anything goes metaphysically speaking, and no general metaphysical principles are assumed. 3. Polysemy: There is no principled difference between causal and non-causal claims; to what extent a claim is causal depends on family resemblance of inferential systems. And family resemblance is much more than hand-waving in this case: We know the typical kinds of proposition in inferential base and target.

More information about Julian Reiss: http://jreiss.org/jreiss.org/Home.html