Theories of Causality in Analytic Philosophy

Bibliographic Data

ID19215567
AuthorsGerhard Schurz (0000-0002-4107-9240, corresponding author)
Year2026
Volume78
Issue3
Pages775-804
Publication date2026-04-18
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueKZfSS Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0023-2653 • E-ISSN: 1861-891X
PublisherSpringer Science+Business Media (PUBLISHER • DE)
DOI10.1007/s11577-026-01070-z
OpenAlexW7154834497
LanguageEN
Citations received4
References cited53

This article provides an overview and critical discussion of major approaches to causality in contemporary analytic philosophy, with a focus on their relevance to the social sciences. After a discussion of regularity accounts of causality in the spirit of logical empiricism (Sections 2–3), four important groups of more recent postpositivist approaches are examined: counterfactual accounts of causality within the metaphysical framework of similarity-ordered possible worlds (Section 4), temporal accounts and causal process accounts that operate at the level of physics (Sections 5–6), interventionist accounts of causality (Section 7), and, finally, the theory of causal nets, which does not attempt to provide a definition of causality but characterizes causality by theoretical axioms (Sections 8–9). The last account is most general and transdisciplinary, being applicable across all scientific fields. Section 10 addresses issues concerning causal relations between values of variables—as opposed to relations between variables themselves—such as causal preemption and overdetermination. The last section is devoted to causal–mechanistic models of explanation

Axiom · Causality (physics) · Causation · Counterfactual conditional · Counterfactual thinking · Empiricism · Metaphysics · Relevance (law) · Philosophy and History of Science · Philosophy and Theoretical Science · Philosophy, Science, and History