Philosophical works on causality?

December 5, 2014 10:41 AM

I'm a social science grad student, and I'm learning a lot about models of causal inference, like mediation analysis and Judea Pearl's work. Could anyone who knows anything about Philosophy recommend some works dealing with causality?

I was thinking of picking up L.A. Paul's Causation: A User's Guide or the Oxford Handbook of Causation. I found them via Amazon and am wondering if anyone has better recommendations. Thanks

posted by MisantropicPainforest to Education (9 answers total)

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Entry on the Metaphysics of Causation is a good place to start. And has a rather thorough bibliography.
posted by standardasparagus at 10:54 AM on December 5, 2014

Paul is very good (and good on this topic in general). Also, the various relevant SEP articles (not necessarily a complete set of links). From my perspective (which is definitely not the only one) the single most important older work to read on causation is David Lewis's 1973 paper Causation; I see that this is easily accessible via google in non-paywalled (but possibly not intentionally public, hence the lack of a link) PDF form, and is at the center of the first SEP article I linked.

A warning: this is a topic that gets more elusive the more you try to pin it down. If your goals are practical, philosophical work on causation will be a rabbit hole.
posted by advil at 10:56 AM on December 5, 2014

Hume argued that we have no experience, and therefore no knowledge, of any "necessary connection" between events, and his position framed a lot of the subsequent debate in philosophy.
posted by thelonius at 11:15 AM on December 5, 2014

I agree with advil and standardasparagus.

Causation: A User's Cuide is certainly the right place to start - Paul & Hall are both excellent philosophers and they write well.
posted by HoraceH at 11:16 AM on December 5, 2014

Just a quick FYI, as a social scientist—not to presume any knowledge or lack of knowledge in the question. This is meant to be more of a just-in-case comment. :-)

I think you're asking about analytic philosophy here, no? If so, analytic philosophy as a discipline makes a number of ontological assumptions that are positions rather than common wisdom in some branches of the social sciences.

This means that philosophers often understand questions like What caused X to happen? or What contributed to Y? in ways that may not be pertinent to your field of study, or may have to be adapted. They embed certain understandings of the social within their conditions of possibility for addressing their concerns. I'm thinking here of questions like the constitution of the subject/subjectivity, constituent vs. articulatory politics, the production of meaning, the ontology of the individual, and so forth.

This doesn't mean that analytic philosophy is "wrong," but there are emergent regularities in it that play fast+loose with the social world and have to be defended. In many social-science disciplines/departments, you'll be scrutinized on those commitments.

If on the other hand you're in a heavily positivist program or department, analytic philosophy will probably make your work more rigorous within that framework.
posted by migrantology at 4:47 PM on December 5, 2014

Good recommendations above, including the recommendation to limit your own descent into the rabbit hole. It's great to get a sketch of the available views, and then see how they connect to your actual project; it wouldn't be great to get sucked into trying to understand the debates in another field and neglect your own project.

Lewis is extremely influential on the contemporary discussion (e.g., Paul was his student), and you'll want to bear this in mind - you might end up looking at philosophical writings that assume his framework, and you should be aware that's what is going on and that framework isn't the only one available. Contemporary philosophers work on causation for a bunch of reasons, many of which are connected to other larger projects they are working on (projects about logic or language or mind etc)... so the possible argumentative moves they accept and reject are often influenced by commitments/priorities outside of just the questions about causality that are under discussion in a given article.
posted by LobsterMitten at 7:53 PM on December 5, 2014

Oh actually, are you interested in learning about philosophers' take on causal inferences (how we reason about causal questions, for example in the sciences) or causation itself?

Inductive inferences have their own whole set of philosophical questions associated with them, and it sounds like you might be looking more at questions like that - for example, what makes some inductive or statistical inferences well-justified? What does good reasoning about a causal claim look like? What kind of explanations is science trying to provide, and what kind of evidence can properly be used to support belief in an explanation of that type?

The literature on causation is on a different subject: understanding the nature of causation itself (what exactly happens when one billiard ball knocks into another one and the second one moves, when if ever is it true to say that one thing/event caused another, etc).

If you're really interested in the epistemology/reasoning/philosophy of science stuff instead, these are better SEP articles to start from:
- scientific explanation
- inductive logic
- problem of induction
- inference to the best explanation/abductive reasoning
posted by LobsterMitten at 8:18 PM on December 5, 2014

Thanks all! Yes I'm in a heavily positivist department and thats the work I'll be doing, I'm more looking to have my causal inferences more rigorous.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 6:12 AM on December 6, 2014

I'm not sure what positivism means in the social sciences, but it sounds like you should look at work on reasoning (the links in my last comment), not on causation itself - the Paul book and others mentioned above are about the metaphysics of causation, not about improving the rigor of inferences.
posted by LobsterMitten at 1:18 PM on December 6, 2014