•  230
    Stability, breadth and guidance
    with Nadya Vasilyeva and Tania Lombrozo
    Philosophical Studies 175 (9): 2263-2283. 2018.
    Much recent work on explanation in the interventionist tradition emphasizes the explanatory value of stable causal generalizations—i.e., causal generalizations that remain true in a wide range of background circumstances. We argue that two separate explanatory virtues are lumped together under the heading of `stability’. We call these two virtues breadth and guidance respectively. In our view, these two virtues are importantly distinct, but this fact is neglected or at least under-appreciated in…Read more
  •  209
    Explanatory Abstraction and the Goldilocks Problem: Interventionism Gets Things Just Right
    British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 71 (2): 633-663. 2020.
    Theories of explanation need to account for a puzzling feature of our explanatory practices: the fact that we prefer explanations that are relatively abstract but only moderately so. Contra Franklin-Hall ([2016]), I argue that the interventionist account of explanation provides a natural and elegant explanation of this fact. By striking the right balance between specificity and generality, moderately abstract explanations optimally subserve what interventionists regard as the goal of explan…Read more
  •  194
    Bayesianism and Explanatory Unification: A Compatibilist Account
    Philosophy of Science 85 (4): 682-703. 2018.
    Proponents of IBE claim that the ability of a hypothesis to explain a range of phenomena in a unifying way contributes to the hypothesis’s credibility in light of these phenomena. I propose a Bayesian justification of this claim that reveals a hitherto unnoticed role for explanatory unification in evaluating the plausibility of a hypothesis: considerations of explanatory unification enter into the determination of a hypothesis’s prior by affecting its ‘explanatory coherence’, that is, the extent…Read more
  •  187
    Experiments on causal exclusion
    with Dylan Murray and Tania Lombrozo
    Mind and Language 37 (5): 1067-1089. 2022.
    Intuitions play an important role in the debate on the causal status of high‐level properties. For instance, Kim has claimed that his “exclusion argument” relies on “a perfectly intuitive … understanding of the causal relation.” We report the results of three experiments examining whether laypeople really have the relevant intuitions. We find little support for Kim's view and the principles on which it relies. Instead, we find that laypeople are willing to count both a multiply realized property…Read more
  •  171
    Best-System Laws, Explanation, and Unification
    In Christian Loew, Siegfried Jaag & Michael Townsen Hicks (eds.), Humean Laws for Human Agents, Oxford Up. 2023.
    In recent years, an active research program has emerged that aims to develop a Humean best-system account (BSA) of laws of nature that improves on Lewis’s canonical articulation of the view. Its guiding idea is that the laws are cognitive tools tailored to the specific needs and limitations of creatures like us. While current versions of this “pragmatic Humean” research program fare much better than Lewis’s account along many dimensions, I will argue that they have trouble making sense of c…Read more
  •  155
    Specificity of association in epidemiology
    Synthese 200 (6). 2022.
    The epidemiologist Bradford Hill famously argued that in epidemiology, specificity of association (roughly, the fact that an environmental or behavioral risk factor is associated with just one or at most a few medical outcomes) is strong evidence of causation. Prominent epidemiologists have dismissed Hill’s claim on the ground that it relies on a dubious `one-cause one effect’ model of disease causation. The paper examines this methodological controversy, and argues that specificity consideratio…Read more
  •  117
    Physics and Causation
    Philosophy Compass 11 (5): 256-266. 2016.
    More than a century ago, Russell launched a forceful attack on causation, arguing not only that modern physics has no need for causal notions but also that our belief in causation is a relic of a pre-scientific view of the world. He thereby initiated a debate about the relations between physics and causation that remains very much alive today. While virtually everybody nowadays rejects Russell's causal eliminativism, many philosophers have been convinced by Russell that the fundamental physical …Read more
  •  81
    How Physics Makes Us Free (review)
    Journal of Philosophy 114 (3): 160-164. 2017.
  •  77
    Cause without Default
    In Helen Beebee, Christopher Hitchcock & Huw Price (eds.), Making a Difference, Oxford University Press. pp. 175-214. 2017.
  •  65
  •  63
    Bayesian Occam's Razor Is a Razor of the People
    with Tania Lombrozo and Shaun Nichols
    Cognitive Science 42 (4): 1345-1359. 2018.
    Occam's razor—the idea that all else being equal, we should pick the simpler hypothesis—plays a prominent role in ordinary and scientific inference. But why are simpler hypotheses better? One attractive hypothesis known as Bayesian Occam's razor is that more complex hypotheses tend to be more flexible—they can accommodate a wider range of possible data—and that flexibility is automatically penalized by Bayesian inference. In two experiments, we provide evidence that people's intuitive probabilis…Read more
  •  50
    Stable Causal Relationships Are Better Causal Relationships
    with Nadya Vasilyeva and Tania Lombrozo
    Cognitive Science 42 (4): 1265-1296. 2018.
    We report three experiments investigating whether people’s judgments about causal relationships are sensitive to the robustness or stability of such relationships across a range of background circumstances. In Experiment 1, we demonstrate that people are more willing to endorse causal and explanatory claims based on stable (as opposed to unstable) relationships, even when the overall causal strength of the relationship is held constant. In Experiment 2, we show that this effect is not driven by …Read more
  •  22
    The causal efficacy of composites: a dilemma for interventionism
    Philosophical Studies 180 (9): 2685-2706. 2023.
    This paper argues that the interventionist account of causation faces a dilemma concerning macroscopic causation – i.e., causation by composite objects. Interventionism must either require interventions on a composite object to hold the behavior of its parts fixed, or allow such interventions to vary the behavior of those parts. The first option runs the risk of making wholes causally excluded by their parts, while the second runs the risk of mistakenly ascribing to wholes causal abilities that …Read more
  •  20
    Causal modeling in multilevel settings: A new proposal
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. forthcoming.
    An important question for the causal modeling approach is how to integrate non‐causal dependence relations such as asymmetric supervenience into the approach. The most prominent proposal to that effect (due to Gebharter) is to treat those dependence relationships as formally analogous to causal relationships. We argue that this proposal neglects some crucial differences between causal and non‐causal dependencies, and that in the context of causal modeling non‐causal dependence relationships shou…Read more
  •  20
    Default knowledge, time pressure, and the theory-theory of concepts
    Behavioral and Brain Sciences 33 (2-3): 206-207. 2010.
    I raise two issues for Machery's discussion and interpretation of the theory-theory. First, I raise an objection against Machery's claim that theory-theorists take theories to be default bodies of knowledge. Second, I argue that theory-theorists' experimental results do not support Machery's contention that default bodies of knowledge include theories used in their own proprietary kind of categorization process
  •  15
    Host Specificity in Biological Control
    British Journal for the Philosophy of Science. forthcoming.
    In recent years the notion of biological specificity has attracted significant philosophical attention. This paper focuses on host specificity, a kind of biological specificity that has not yet been discussed by philosophers, and which concerns the extent to which a species is selective in the range of other species it exploits for feeding and/or reproduction. Host specificity is an important notion in ecology, where it plays a variety of theoretical roles. Here I focus on the role of host speci…Read more
  •  2
    Causation and the Time-Asymmetry of Knowledge
    Australasian Journal of Philosophy. forthcoming.
    This paper argues that the knowledge asymmetry (the fact that we know more about the past than the future) can be explained as a consequence of the causal Markov condition. The causal Markov condition implies that causes of a common effect are generally statistically independent, whereas effects of a common cause are generally correlated. I show that together with certain facts about the physics of our world, the statistical independence of causes severely limits our ability to predict the futur…Read more