James Woodward
Biographic Data
| ID | 123155 |
|---|---|
| NAME | James Woodward |
| GIVEN NAMES | James |
| FAMILY NAME | Woodward |
| SIGNATURE | WOODWARD J |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Pittsburgh |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-6402-2554 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 67 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 474 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 67 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1976 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 11 |
Brains, Networks and Dynamics
This paper argues that when brain networks figure in explanations of cognition and behavior they often do so in conjunction with independent dynamical assumptions about signal transmission in the brain. In such cases explanation does not depend on network structure alone but on network structure operating in conjunction with dynamical assumptions. Moreover, dynamical assumptions embody causal information, so that the resulting explanations are no…
There is no such thing as a statistical explanation
Networks, dynamics and explanation
Some reflections on Robert Batterman's a middle way
The Worldly Infrastructure of Causation
This paper describes an alternative to currently dominant philosophical approaches to the metaphysics of causation. It is motivated by the gap that currently exists between metaphysical accounts and recent epistemological research on causal reasoning and methods for discovering causal relationships. Our approach aims at characterizing structural features of the actual world that support, and are exploited by, successful strategies for causal reas…
Responses
Response to comments
Irreversible (One-hit) and Reversible (Sustaining) Causation
This paper explores a distinction among causal relationships that has yet to receive attention in the philosophical literature, namely, whether causal relationships are reversible or irreversible. We provide an analysis of this distinction and show how it has important implications for causal inference and modeling. This work also clarifies how various familiar puzzles involving preemption and over-determination play out differently depending on …
Some Empirical Results Concerning Causal Learning and Representation
This chapter explores some empirical results bearing on the descriptive and normative adequacy of different accounts of causal learning and representation. It begins by contrasting associative accounts with accounts that attribute additional structure to causal representation, arguing in favor of the latter. Empirical results supporting the claim that adult humans often reason about causal relationships using interventionist counterfactuals are p…
Invariance
This chapter explores the notion of invariance, which is of central normative importance in causal reasoning and is also central to its descriptive characterization, as shown in subsequent chapters. The invariance of a causal relationship has to do with the extent that it continues to be operative across various sorts of changes—in background conditions, changes in the distribution of initial conditions, and different micro-realizations of a caus…
Invariance Applied
This chapter applies the ideas about invariance from Chapter 5 to the analysis (both normative and descriptive) of various aspects of commonsense cause reasoning. The focus is mainly on one particular kind of invariance—invariance under changes in background conditions, here called insensitivity. This is used to cast light on causal judgments involving omissions and examples involving double prevention (in which the occurrence of c prevents the o…
The Normative and the Descriptive
This chapter introduces some of the basic themes of Causation with a Human Face. Accounts of causal reasoning can either be normative (concerned with how we ought to reason) or descriptive (concerned with how we in fact reason). The two kinds of accounts will be related to the extent that people are “rational” in their causal reasoning—that is, reason in normatively appropriate ways. The rationality or normativity of causal reasoning is understoo…
Proportionality
This chapter discusses, again from both a normative and a descriptive perspective, issues having to do with the role of proportionality in causal judgment. In my treatment, proportionality has to do, roughly, with the extent to which a cause is characterized in such a way that the variation in the effect is captured by variation in the cause. Proportionality was introduced into philosophical discussion by Yablo; this chapter retains the underlyin…
Copyright Page
Experimental Results Concerning Invariance: Cheng, Lombrozo, and Others
This chapter discusses some psychological theories and experimental results (due to Cheng and Lombrozo, among others) having to do with the role of invariance in causal cognition. The models and results broadly support the claim that invariance considerations are important in causal reasoning but I also use them to explore some methodological issues that arise in experimental studies of causal cognition. These include the sensitivity of experimen…
Methods for Investigating Causal Cognition: Armchair Philosophy, X-Phi, and Empirical Psychology
This chapter critically discusses several methods for investigating causal cognition, including the intuition-driven, case judgment methods employed in traditional armchair philosophy, experimental philosophy approaches, and those employed in experimental psychology. It is argued that appeals to intuition should not be understood as sources of information about the metaphysics of causation (what causation “is”) or about “our concept” of causation…
Dedication
Theories of Causation
This chapter is a critical discussion of some standard accounts of causation in the philosophical literature with brief forays into related literature in psychology and machine learning. Accounts discussed include regularity, counterfactual, interventionist, and geometrical mechanical theories. The use of directed graphs and structural equations to model causal relationships and the contrast between model-based and model-free approaches is also d…
Explanatory autonomy: The role of proportionality, stability, and conditional irrelevance
Causation with a Human Face: Normative Theory and Descriptive Psychology
Causation with a Human Face integrates normative work about causal reasoning coming out of philosophy, computer science, and other disciplines-work that specifies how people ought to reason causally-with descriptive research from psychology concerning how people in fact reason about causal relationships. It argues that each line of inquiry can beneficially inform the other. Normative ideas can suggest interesting experiments, and descriptive resu…
Flagpoles anyone? Causal and explanatory asymmetries
This paper discusses some procedures developed in recent work in machine learning for inferring causal direction from observational data. The role of independence and invariance assumptions is emphasized. Several familiar examples including Hempel’s flagpole problem are explored in the light of these ideas. The framework is then applied to problems having to do with explanatory direction in non-causal explanation
Physical modality, laws, and counterfactuals
Causal Complexity, Conditional Independence, and Downward Causation
This article defends the notion of downward causation, relating it to a notion of conditional independence
On Wolfgang Spohn’s Laws of Belief
This is one of a pair of discussion notes comparing some features of the account of causation in Wolfgang Spohn’s Laws of Belief with the “interventionist” account in James Woodward’s Making Things Happen . Despite striking similarities there are also important differences. These include (i) the “epistemic” orientation of Spohn’s account as opposed to the worldly or “ontic” orientation of the interventionist account, (ii) Spohn’s focus on token-l…
Causal Cognition: Physical Connections, Proportionality, and the Role of Normative Theory
This paper, like its companion (“Normative Theory and Descriptive Psychology in Understanding Causal Reasoning: The Role of Interventions and Invariance”) explores some ways in which, on the one hand, normative (philosophical or theoretical) theorizing about causation and causal reasoning and, on the other, empirical psychological investigations into causal cognition can be mutually illuminating. The paper carries out this exploration in connecti…
Conundrums in practical theology
All those engaged in learning and teaching will have a system for organising books and resources of information. They may be, inevitably, a number of systems that may range from ad-hoc freedom thro
Saving the Phenomena
A according to a widely shared view of science, scientific theories predict and explain facts about observables: objects and properties which can be perceived by the senses, sometimes augmented by instruments. In the tradition associated with logical positivism, this view receives an influential formulation in terms of a supposed distinction between two kinds of vocabularies and an allied claim about the structure of theories. According to the po…
Interventionism and Causal Exclusion
A number of writers, myself included, have recently argued that an “interventionist” treatment of causation of the sort defended in Woodward, 2003 can be used to cast light on so‐called “causal exclusion” arguments. This interventionist treatment of causal exclusion has in turn been criticized by other philosophers. This paper responds to these criticisms. It describes an interventionist framework for thinking about causal relationships when supe…
Explanation and Invariance in the Special Sciences
This paper describes an alternative to the common view that explanation in the special sciences involves subsumption under laws. According to this alternative, whether or not a generalization can be used to explain has to do with whether it is invariant rather than with whether it is lawful. A generalization is invariant if it is stable or robust in the sense that it would continue to hold under a relevant if it is stable or robust in the sense t…
Independence, Invariance and the Causal Markov Condition
This essay explains what the Causal Markov Condition says and defends the condition from the many criticisms that have been launched against it. Although we are skeptical about some of the applications of the Causal Markov Condition, we argue that it is implicit in the view that causes can be used to manipulate their effects and that it cannot be surrendered without surrendering this view of causation.
The problem of variable choice
Sensitive and Insensitive Causation
Research Article| January 01 2006 Sensitive and Insensitive Causation James Woodward James Woodward Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google The Philosophical Review (2006) 115 (1): 1–50. https://doi.org/10.1215/00318108-2005-001 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation James Woodward; Sensitive and Insensitive Causation. The Philosophical Review 1 January 2006; 115 (1): 1–50. doi: https://doi.org…
Simplicity in the Best Systems Account of Laws of Nature
This article discusses the role of simplicity and the notion of a best balance of simplicity and strength within the best systems account (BSA) of laws of nature. The article explores whether there is anything in scientific practice that corresponds to the notion of simplicity or to the trade-off between simplicity and strength to which the BSA appeals. Various theoretical rationales for simplicity preferences and their bearing on the identificat…
Data, Phenomena, Signal, and Noise
This essay attempts to provide additional motivation for the data/phenomena framework advocated in Bogen and Woodward, “Saving the Phenomena” (1988)
Modularity and the Causal Markov Condition: A Restatement
Nancy Cartwright's comments ([2002]) expose some gaps and difficulties in the argument for the causal Markov condition in our essay ‘Independence, Invariance and the Causal Markov Condition’ ([1999]), and we are grateful for the opportunity to reformulate our position. In particular, Cartwright disagrees vigorously with many of the theses we advance about the connection between causation and manipulation. Although we are not persuaded by some of …
Methodology, ontology, and interventionism
Explanatory autonomy: The role of proportionality, stability, and conditional irrelevance
Causation with a Human Face: Normative Theory and Descriptive Psychology
Causation with a Human Face integrates normative work about causal reasoning coming out of philosophy, computer science, and other disciplines-work that specifies how people ought to reason causally-with descriptive research from psychology concerning how people in fact reason about causal relationships. It argues that each line of inquiry can beneficially inform the other. Normative ideas can suggest interesting experiments, and descriptive resu…
Scientific Explanation
Mechanisms revisited
Folk Psychology is Here to Stay
Folk psychology is a network of principles which constitutes a sort of common-sense theory about how to explain human behavior. These principles provide a central role to certain propositional attitudes, particularly beliefs and desires. The theory asserts, for example, that if someone desires that p, and this desire is not overridden by other desires, and he believes that an action of kind K will bring it about that p, and he believes that such …
Sensitive and Insensitive Causation
Dependence and SensitivityConsider a paradigmatic causal transaction.Suzy stands in front of a fragile glass bottle with a large rock in her hand.No other possible causes of the bottle's breaking -no backup or preemptive throwers, no earthquakes and so on -are waiting in the wings.Suzy throws; the rock strikes the bottle squarely, and it shatters.The impact of the rock caused the bottle to shatter.In discussing such examples, philosophers who are…
Manipulation and the Causal Markov Condition
This paper explores the relationship between a manipulability conception of causation and the causal Markov condition (CM). We argue that violations of CM also violate widely shared expectations—implicit in the manipulability conception—having to do with the absence of spontaneous correlations. They also violate expectations concerning the connection between independence or dependence relationships in the presence and absence of interventions
Black southern signing
Recent research in American Sign Language (ASL) has concentrated on demonstrating that ASL, a language channelled through the manual-visual modality, has linguistic properties similar to those of oral languages, except for physical sound. The absence of sound, however, really presents no theoretical problem since ASL has a formational level of structure analogous to, but not dependent on, the phonological component of oral languages (Stokoe 1960;…
Koch’s postulates: An interventionist perspective
Explanatory Asymmetries
This paper examines a recent attempt by Evan Jobe to account for the asymmetric character of many scientific explanations. It is argued that a purported counterexample to Jobe's account, from Clark Glymour, is inconclusive, but that the account faces independent objections. It is also suggested, contrary to Jobe, that the explanatory relation is not always asymmetric. Sometimes a singular sentence C can figure in a DN derivation of another singul…
Causal Complexity, Conditional Independence, and Downward Causation
This article defends the notion of downward causation, relating it to a notion of conditional independence
Causation: Interactions between Philosophical Theories and Psychological Research
This article explores some ways in which philosophical theories of causation and empirical investigations into causal learning and judgment can mutually inform one another
Developmental explanation
Sign language and the deaf community a sociolinguistic profile∗
Irreversible (One-hit) and Reversible (Sustaining) Causation
This paper explores a distinction among causal relationships that has yet to receive attention in the philosophical literature, namely, whether causal relationships are reversible or irreversible. We provide an analysis of this distinction and show how it has important implications for causal inference and modeling. This work also clarifies how various familiar puzzles involving preemption and over-determination play out differently depending on …
Black southern signing
Recent research in American Sign Language (ASL) has concentrated on demonstrating that ASL, a language channelled through the manual-visual modality, has linguistic properties similar to those of oral languages, except for physical sound. The absence of sound, however, really presents no theoretical problem since ASL has a formational level of structure analogous to, but not dependent on, the phonological component of oral languages (Stokoe 1960;…
Negative incorporation in French and American sign language
This paper examines Negative Incorporation in various lects of two historically related sign languages, French Sign Language and American Sign Language. Negative Incorporation not only offers interesting insights into the structure of French and American Sign Language, but also into the descriptive and explanatory power of variation theory. By viewing Negative Incorporation in a dynamic framework, we are able to describe the variable usage of Neg…
Quelques aspects sociolinguistiques des langues des signes américaine et française
Woodward James. Quelques aspects sociolinguistiques des langues des signes américaine et française. In: Langages, 13e année, n°56, 1979. La langue des signes, sous la direction de François Grosjean et Harlan Lane. pp. 78-91
Sign language and the deaf community a sociolinguistic profile∗
Scientific Explanation and Sklar's Views of Space and Time
We examine critically the interdependence between science and philosophy which Sklar asserts in Space, Time, and Spacetime. We find that such a view makes it difficult to criticize the ideas of science, like that of absolute space, on their own merits, without importing extraneous philosophical associations. It also impedes appreciation of the importance, and subtlety, of explanation in scientific theory. As a result, particular explanations, suc…
Scientific Explanation
Developmental explanation
Linguistics: The Contexts of Language. Ronald Wardhaugh
American Sign Language Syntax
Explanatory Asymmetries
This paper examines a recent attempt by Evan Jobe to account for the asymmetric character of many scientific explanations. It is argued that a purported counterexample to Jobe's account, from Clark Glymour, is inconclusive, but that the account faces independent objections. It is also suggested, contrary to Jobe, that the explanatory relation is not always asymmetric. Sometimes a singular sentence C can figure in a DN derivation of another singul…
Folk Psychology is Here to Stay
Folk psychology is a network of principles which constitutes a sort of common-sense theory about how to explain human behavior. These principles provide a central role to certain propositional attitudes, particularly beliefs and desires. The theory asserts, for example, that if someone desires that p, and this desire is not overridden by other desires, and he believes that an action of kind K will bring it about that p, and he believes that such …
On an Information-Theoretic Model of Explanation
This paper is an assessment of an attempt, by James Greeno, to measure the explanatory power of statistical theories by means of the notion of transmitted information ( I t ). It is argued that I t has certain features that are inappropriate in a measure of explanatory power. In particular, given a statistical theory T with explanans variables S i and explanandum variables M j , it is argued that no plausible measure of explanatory power should d…
Saving the Phenomena
A according to a widely shared view of science, scientific theories predict and explain facts about observables: objects and properties which can be perceived by the senses, sometimes augmented by instruments. In the tradition associated with logical positivism, this view receives an influential formulation in terms of a supposed distinction between two kinds of vocabularies and an allied claim about the structure of theories. According to the po…
Laws and Causes
Explaining Explanation
Turgenev's Fathers and Sons
Practical Theology In Action: Christian Thinking in the Service of Church and Society
This widely-used student text has been extremely successful in the past 8 years. It offers a basic introduction to all those who need to apply Christian thinking to the service of Church and society. The alterations in the new edition are minor, but academically significant - a new chapter has been added on inner city issues, which covers a wide range of more recent issues: post-modernism, pluralism, the new spirituality, emergence of congregatio…
The Sky is Red: Discerning the Signs of the Times
Causal Independence and Faithfulness
Independence, Invariance and the Causal Markov Condition
This essay explains what the Causal Markov Condition says and defends the condition from the many criticisms that have been launched against it. Although we are skeptical about some of the applications of the Causal Markov Condition, we argue that it is implicit in the view that causes can be used to manipulate their effects and that it cannot be surrendered without surrendering this view of causation.
Explanation and Invariance in the Special Sciences
This paper describes an alternative to the common view that explanation in the special sciences involves subsumption under laws. According to this alternative, whether or not a generalization can be used to explain has to do with whether it is invariant rather than with whether it is lawful. A generalization is invariant if it is stable or robust in the sense that it would continue to hold under a relevant if it is stable or robust in the sense t…
Making Things Happen: A Theory of Causal Explanation
This book develops a manipulationist theory of causation and explanation: causal and explanatory relationships are relationships that are potentially exploitable for purposes of manipulation and control. The resulting theory is a species of counterfactual theory that (I claim) avoids the difficulties and counterexamples that have infected alternative accounts of causation and explanation, from the Deductive-Nomological model onwards. One of the k…
Manipulation and the Causal Markov Condition
This paper explores the relationship between a manipulability conception of causation and the causal Markov condition (CM). We argue that violations of CM also violate widely shared expectations—implicit in the manipulability conception—having to do with the absence of spontaneous correlations. They also violate expectations concerning the connection between independence or dependence relationships in the presence and absence of interventions
Modularity and the Causal Markov Condition: A Restatement
Nancy Cartwright's comments ([2002]) expose some gaps and difficulties in the argument for the causal Markov condition in our essay ‘Independence, Invariance and the Causal Markov Condition’ ([1999]), and we are grateful for the opportunity to reformulate our position. In particular, Cartwright disagrees vigorously with many of the theses we advance about the connection between causation and manipulation. Although we are not persuaded by some of …
Making Things Happen: A Theory of Causal Explanation (Oxford Studies in the Philosophy of Science)
Philosophy (57 works) · Epistemology (49 works) · Philosophy and History of Science (31 works) · Causation (26 works) · Computer Science (26 works) · Mathematics (26 works) · Psychology (25 works) · Philosophy and Theoretical Science (14 works) · Philosophy of science (14 works) · Sociology (14 works)