In Defence of Conceptually Non-Reductive Explications of Causation

Abstract

Chapters 4–6 attempted to achieve the negative goal of this book: they have attempted to establish a critique of Woodward’s interventionist theory of causation. Chapter 4 argued for the claim that the notion of a possible intervention is highly problematic, because it is either dispensable or it leads to an inadequate evaluation of interventionist counterfactuals. It was concluded that this is a discouraging result for interventionists. Chapter 5 raised a follow-up problem resulting from the arguments in Chapter 4: interventionists, such as Woodward, use the notion of a possible intervention to analyse what it is to be a special science law (the interventionist invariance account of laws). Yet, if the arguments presented in Chapter 4 are sound, then one cannot maintain the invariance account of laws as it stands, because its success depends on the problematic notion of an intervention. Facing this problem, an alternative view of non-universal laws (i.e. ‘lawish statements’) in the special sciences was provided. My account of non-universal laws crucially relies on quasi-Newtonian laws and a refined notion of invariance* (that does not depend on interventions). The primary target in Chapter 6 was the open-systems argument that is entertained by several interventionists.