I wasn’t exposed to philosophy as such in high school, but I did take a world religions class that raised many philosophy of religion topics and increased my interest in comparing religions and worldviews. As part of my exploration of…
This leaves our final option, which is to hold that a normatively-grounded approach to the granularity problem in causal modelling should allow for lossy compression, and that Woodward’s proportionality criterion should be modified to allow for this. As a guide…
Woodward, J. (2008). “Mental Causation and Neural Mechanisms,” in J. Hohwy and J. Kallestrup, eds., Being Reduced: New Essays on Reduction, Explanation, and Causation (. Oxford: Oxford University Press), 218–262. In Woodward and Hitchcock (2003), we proposed a model of causal explanation…
Bontly, T. (2005) “Proportionality, Causation and Exclusion” Philosophia 32: 331-348. Second, a causal claim might fail to represent one or more dependency relations that are present in the system of interest and that should be represented. Call this omission. This discussion of proportionality…
With death many people’s greatest fear, cosmists and transhumanists can offer a seductive myth of immortality. In Moscow at the end of the 19th century a librarian of poor origins started reflecting on how future human beings, raising themselves from…
A cognitive corollary of Kuhn’s question is, “What must we humans assume the world be like, in order that we may know it?” James Woodward’s work on invariance has opened up several lines of inquiry into an answer to this…
Philosophers may wonder about the relationship between invariance and other similar sounding ideas in the literature- lawlikeness, projectability and so on. As I explained in CHF and elsewhere I see laws of nature as, so to speak, limiting cases on the invariance…
On the day of fasting the devotee should be careful not to speak to those fallen from religious duties, dog-eaters, thieves, or hypocrites. He should also avoid speaking with slanderers and blasphemers of demigods, Vedic literatures, or brahmanas. They should…
One of Woodward’s most important contributions to the study of causation is his introduction of the notion of invariance across background conditions. Woodward‘s ideas on this topic have had a major influence on experimental research in causal cognition (including on my own…
Hitchcock, C. & Knobe, J. (2009). Cause and Norm. Journal of Philosophy, 106: 587-612. This issue, note, is intimately related to the question of the function(s) of actual cause judgments. One idea is that actual cause judgments seek to identify…
Featured image: T. Cheah & S. van der Moezel, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Australia. That’s the normative story but, following the methodology described in previous posts, we may also ask about the extent to which a preference for invariant relationships…
As explained in the previous post, one very rich area of inquiry concerns the extent to which normative theories of causal reasoning, from both philosophy and elsewhere, successfully characterize how, as an empirical matter, various sorts of subjects (adults, children, non-human animals)…
As this example illustrates there are often complex and interesting relations between normative and descriptive theories in this area (and I believe in the study of cognition more generally) . On the one hand, we can ask, regarding a normative…
The person who cares doesn’t have just one motivation, and they are not just one type of person. It’s important to challenge simplistic ‘social contract’ descriptions, but similarly simplistic accounts of ‘special’ family relationships won’t stand up to scrutiny. People…
