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121Identifying intervention variablesEuropean Journal for Philosophy of Science 3 (2): 183-205. 2013.The essential precondition of implementing interventionist techniques of causal reasoning is that particular variables are identified as so-called intervention variables. While the pertinent literature standardly brackets the question how this can be accomplished in concrete contexts of causal discovery, the first part of this paper shows that the interventionist nature of variables cannot, in principle, be established based only on an interventionist notion of causation. The second part then de…Read more
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35Measuring and governing: John T. Roberts: The Law-Governed Universe. Oxford University Press, New York, 2008, xii + 407 pp. US$ 100.00 HBMetascience 19 (3): 409-412. 2010.
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25Measuring and Governing, Review of "The Law-Governed Universe" by John T. Roberts (review)Metascience 19 (3): 409-412. 2010.
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95Detecting Causal Chains in Small-N DataField Methods 25 3-24. 2013.The first part of this paper shows that Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA)--also in its most recent forms as presented in Ragin (2000, 2008)--, does not correctly analyze data generated by causal chains, which, after all, are very common among causal processes in the social sciences. The incorrect modeling of data originating from chains essentially stems from QCA’s reliance on Quine-McCluskey optimization to eliminate redundancies from sufficient and necessary conditions. Baumgartner (2009a…Read more
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110The Logical Form of InterventionismPhilosophia 40 (4): 751-761. 2012.This paper argues that, notwithstanding the remarkable popularity of Woodward's (2003) interventionist analysis of causation, the exact definitional details of that theory are surprisingly little understood. There exists a discrepancy in the literature between the clarity about the logical details of interventionism, on the one hand, and the enormous work interventionism is expected to do, on the other. The first part of the paper distinguishes three significantly different readings of the logic…Read more
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356Interventionist Causal Exclusion and Non‐reductive PhysicalismInternational Studies in the Philosophy of Science 23 (2): 161-178. 2009.The first part of this paper presents an argument showing that the currently most highly acclaimed interventionist theory of causation, i.e. the one advanced by Woodward, excludes supervening macro properties from having a causal influence on effects of their micro supervenience bases. Moreover, this interventionist exclusion argument is demonstrated to rest on weaker premises than classical exclusion arguments. The second part then discusses a weakening of interventionism that Woodward suggests…Read more
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1Model Ambiguities in Configurational Comparative ResearchSociological Methods & Research 46 954-987. 2017.For many years, sociologists, political scientists, and management scholars have readily relied on Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) for the purpose of configurational causal modeling. However, this article reveals that a severe problem in the application of QCA has gone unnoticed so far: model ambiguities. These arise when multiple causal models fare equally well in accounting for configurational data. Mainly due to the uncritical import of an algorithm that is unsuitable for causal modeli…Read more
Bergen, Hordaland, Norway
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