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899Causation in biology: Stability, specificity, and the choice of levels of explanationBiology and Philosophy 25 (3): 287-318. 2010.This paper attempts to elucidate three characteristics of causal relationships that are important in biological contexts. Stability has to do with whether a causal relationship continues to hold under changes in background conditions. Proportionality has to do with whether changes in the state of the cause “line up” in the right way with changes in the state of the effect and with whether the cause and effect are characterized in a way that contains irrelevant detail. Specificity is connected bo…Read more
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63Book Review: Concepts of Mass in Contemporary Physics and Philosophy, by Max Jammer (review)Foundations of Physics 30 (6): 959-964. 2000.
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265The problem of variable choiceSynthese 193 (4): 1047-1072. 2016.This paper explores some issues about the choice of variables for causal representation and explanation. Depending on which variables a researcher employs, many causal inference procedures and many treatments of causation will reach different conclusions about which causal relationships are present in some system of interest. The assumption of this paper is that some choices of variables are superior to other choices for the purpose of causal analysis. A number of possible criteria for variable …Read more
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States of America
Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Biology |
General Philosophy of Science |