Lorenzo Casini
Biographic Data
| ID | 3861287 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Lorenzo Casini |
| GIVEN NAMES | Lorenzo |
| FAMILY NAME | Casini |
| SIGNATURE | CASINI L |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Geneva |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3075-8501 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 18 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 33 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 16 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2010 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Constitution, Non-Causal Explanation, and Demarcation
In philosophy of science, constitutive explanations have attracted much attention since Craver’s influential book Explaining the Brain (2007). His Mutual Manipulability (MM) theory of constitution aimed to explicate constitution as a non-causal explanatory relation and to demarcate between constituents and non-constituents. But MM received decisive criticism. In response, Craver et al. (2021) have recently proposed a new theory, called Matched In…
Confirmation by Robustness Analysis
Some authors claim that minimal models have limited epistemic value (Fumagalli, 2016; Grüne-Yanoff, 2009a). Others defend the epistemic benefits of modelling by invoking the role of robustness analysis for hypothesis confirmation (see, e.g., Levins, 1966; Kuorikoski et al., 2010) but such arguments find much resistance (see, e.g., Odenbaugh & Alexandrova, 2011). In this paper, we offer a Bayesian rationalization and defence of the view that robus…
The PC Algorithm and the Inference to Constitution
Gebharter has proposed using one of the best known Bayesian network causal discovery algorithms, PC, to identify the constitutive dependencies underwriting mechanistic explanations. His proposal assumes that mechanistic constitution behaves like deterministic direct causation, such that PC is directly applicable to mixed variable sets featuring both causal and constitutive dependencies. Gebharter claims that such mixed sets, under certain restric…
Migration in the Making of the Gulf Space
Conclusion the Gulf Space in Words
Migration in the Making of the Gulf Space
Variable Definition and Independent Components
In the causal modeling literature, it is well known that ill-defined variables may give rise to ambiguous manipulations. Here, we illustrate how ill-defined variables may also induce mistakes in causal inference when standard causal search methods are applied. To address the problem, we introduce a representation framework, which exploits an independent component representation of the data, and demonstrate its potential for detecting ill-defined …
Muḥammad Ḥusayn Haykal’s Anti-Enlightenment Modernity (1916–1925)
In public discourse and scholarly literature alike, the notions of “modernity,” “Enlightenment” and “the West” are often associated. This article underscores the problems inherent in these associations by focusing on the Egyptian context of the second and third decades of the twentieth century, and in particular on several nationalist articles published by Muḥammad Ḥusayn Haykal (1888–1956). The article contends that Haykal’s writings contributed…
Googling Democracy? New Technologies and the Law of Global Governance
This Afterword to Eyal Benvenisti’s EJIL Foreword, ‘Upholding Democracy amid the Challenges of New Technology: What Role for the Law of Global Governance?’ focuses on two sets of issues that Benvenisti analysed. These issues are the multi-fold dimensions of global administrative law and the role of the law of global governance before new technologies, with particular reference to fake news and disinformation, which is probably one of the most har…
International regulation of historic buildings and nationalism
This article focuses on the (ambiguous) relationships between nationalism and international regulation of historic buildings, namely, the activity of UNESCO in this field. It studies two different forms of UNESCO intervention: the creation of a list of world heritage sites of outstanding universal value, which includes several historic cities and buildings; and UNESCO Recommendations aimed at protecting historic urban landscape. The article shows…
The long and winding road to the establishment of state-museums in Italy
The article examines the 2014 reform of the Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Tourism, with specific regard to museums. The analysis deals with three main issues: the creation of a national system of museums and the recognition of the autonomy of state museums; the institutional models and the legal status of state museums; and the strategic role played by the Ministry’s field offices (the 'soprintendenze')
An Abductive Theory of Constitution
The first part of this article finds Craver’s mutual manipulability theory (MM) of constitution inadequate, as it definitionally ties constitution to the feasibility of ideal experiments, which, however, are unrealizable in principle. As an alternative, the second part develops an abductive theory of constitution (NDC), which exploits the fact that phenomena and their constituents are unbreakably coupled via common causes. The best explanation fo…
How to Model Mechanistic Hierarchies
Mechanisms are usually viewed as hierarchical, with lower levels of a mechanism influencing, and decomposing, its higher-level behavior. To draw quantitative predictions from a model of a mechanism, the model must capture this hierarchical aspect. Recursive Bayesian networks (RBNs) were put forward by Lorenzo Casini et al. as a means to model mechanistic hierarchies by decomposing variables into their constituting causal networks. The proposal wa…
Can Interventions Rescue Glennan’s Mechanistic Account of Causality
Glennan ([2011]) appeals to interventions to solve the ontological and explanatory regresses that threaten his mechanistic account of causality (Glennan [1996], [2002]). I argue that Glennan’s manoeuvre fails. The appeal to interventions is not able to address the ontological regress, and it blocks the explanatory regress only at the cost of making the account inapplicable to non-modular mechanisms. I offer a solution to the explanatory regress t…
The emergence of global administrative systems
The “global” dimension of sport is, in the first instance, regulatory, and it embraces the whole complex of norms produced and implemented by regulatory sporting regimes at the international and domestic levels. These rules include not only private norms set by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and by International Federations (IFs) but also “hybrid” public-private norms approved by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) and international la…
Not-So-Minimal Models
What can we learn from “minimal” economic models? I argue that learning from such models is not limited to conceptual explorations—which show how something could be the case—but may extend to explanations of real economic phenomena—which show how something is the case. A model may be minimal qua certain world-linking properties, and yet “not-so-minimal” qua learning, provided it is externally valid. This, in turn, depends on using the right princ…
Knowledge and Religion in Early Modern Europe
Ben-Tov , Yaacov Deutsch, and Tamar Herzig, eds. Knowledge and Religion in Early Modern Europe: Studies in Honor of Michael Heyd. Brill’s Studies in Intellectual History 219. Leiden: Brill, 2013. xii + 238 pp. $152. ISBN: 978-90-04-22564-0. - Volume 67 Issue 1
Quid sit anima’
On account of his insights into human nature and conduct, the Renaissance humanist Juan Luis Vives (1493–1540) has occasionally been called ‘the father of modern psychology’. Even if the praise regarding his originality is not completely undeserved, it is something of an exaggeration to consider him the initiator of modern psychology without further qualifications. The aim of the present article is to analyse Vives's discussion of the general not…
An Abductive Theory of Constitution
The first part of this article finds Craver’s mutual manipulability theory (MM) of constitution inadequate, as it definitionally ties constitution to the feasibility of ideal experiments, which, however, are unrealizable in principle. As an alternative, the second part develops an abductive theory of constitution (NDC), which exploits the fact that phenomena and their constituents are unbreakably coupled via common causes. The best explanation fo…
How to Model Mechanistic Hierarchies
Mechanisms are usually viewed as hierarchical, with lower levels of a mechanism influencing, and decomposing, its higher-level behavior. To draw quantitative predictions from a model of a mechanism, the model must capture this hierarchical aspect. Recursive Bayesian networks (RBNs) were put forward by Lorenzo Casini et al. as a means to model mechanistic hierarchies by decomposing variables into their constituting causal networks. The proposal wa…
Not-So-Minimal Models
What can we learn from “minimal” economic models? I argue that learning from such models is not limited to conceptual explorations—which show how something could be the case—but may extend to explanations of real economic phenomena—which show how something is the case. A model may be minimal qua certain world-linking properties, and yet “not-so-minimal” qua learning, provided it is externally valid. This, in turn, depends on using the right princ…
Can Interventions Rescue Glennan’s Mechanistic Account of Causality
Glennan ([2011]) appeals to interventions to solve the ontological and explanatory regresses that threaten his mechanistic account of causality (Glennan [1996], [2002]). I argue that Glennan’s manoeuvre fails. The appeal to interventions is not able to address the ontological regress, and it blocks the explanatory regress only at the cost of making the account inapplicable to non-modular mechanisms. I offer a solution to the explanatory regress t…
The PC Algorithm and the Inference to Constitution
Gebharter has proposed using one of the best known Bayesian network causal discovery algorithms, PC, to identify the constitutive dependencies underwriting mechanistic explanations. His proposal assumes that mechanistic constitution behaves like deterministic direct causation, such that PC is directly applicable to mixed variable sets featuring both causal and constitutive dependencies. Gebharter claims that such mixed sets, under certain restric…
Variable Definition and Independent Components
In the causal modeling literature, it is well known that ill-defined variables may give rise to ambiguous manipulations. Here, we illustrate how ill-defined variables may also induce mistakes in causal inference when standard causal search methods are applied. To address the problem, we introduce a representation framework, which exploits an independent component representation of the data, and demonstrate its potential for detecting ill-defined …
International regulation of historic buildings and nationalism
This article focuses on the (ambiguous) relationships between nationalism and international regulation of historic buildings, namely, the activity of UNESCO in this field. It studies two different forms of UNESCO intervention: the creation of a list of world heritage sites of outstanding universal value, which includes several historic cities and buildings; and UNESCO Recommendations aimed at protecting historic urban landscape. The article shows…
The long and winding road to the establishment of state-museums in Italy
The article examines the 2014 reform of the Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Tourism, with specific regard to museums. The analysis deals with three main issues: the creation of a national system of museums and the recognition of the autonomy of state museums; the institutional models and the legal status of state museums; and the strategic role played by the Ministry’s field offices (the 'soprintendenze')
Quid sit anima’
On account of his insights into human nature and conduct, the Renaissance humanist Juan Luis Vives (1493–1540) has occasionally been called ‘the father of modern psychology’. Even if the praise regarding his originality is not completely undeserved, it is something of an exaggeration to consider him the initiator of modern psychology without further qualifications. The aim of the present article is to analyse Vives's discussion of the general not…
Not-So-Minimal Models
What can we learn from “minimal” economic models? I argue that learning from such models is not limited to conceptual explorations—which show how something could be the case—but may extend to explanations of real economic phenomena—which show how something is the case. A model may be minimal qua certain world-linking properties, and yet “not-so-minimal” qua learning, provided it is externally valid. This, in turn, depends on using the right princ…
Knowledge and Religion in Early Modern Europe
Ben-Tov , Yaacov Deutsch, and Tamar Herzig, eds. Knowledge and Religion in Early Modern Europe: Studies in Honor of Michael Heyd. Brill’s Studies in Intellectual History 219. Leiden: Brill, 2013. xii + 238 pp. $152. ISBN: 978-90-04-22564-0. - Volume 67 Issue 1
The emergence of global administrative systems
The “global” dimension of sport is, in the first instance, regulatory, and it embraces the whole complex of norms produced and implemented by regulatory sporting regimes at the international and domestic levels. These rules include not only private norms set by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and by International Federations (IFs) but also “hybrid” public-private norms approved by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) and international la…
How to Model Mechanistic Hierarchies
Mechanisms are usually viewed as hierarchical, with lower levels of a mechanism influencing, and decomposing, its higher-level behavior. To draw quantitative predictions from a model of a mechanism, the model must capture this hierarchical aspect. Recursive Bayesian networks (RBNs) were put forward by Lorenzo Casini et al. as a means to model mechanistic hierarchies by decomposing variables into their constituting causal networks. The proposal wa…
Can Interventions Rescue Glennan’s Mechanistic Account of Causality
Glennan ([2011]) appeals to interventions to solve the ontological and explanatory regresses that threaten his mechanistic account of causality (Glennan [1996], [2002]). I argue that Glennan’s manoeuvre fails. The appeal to interventions is not able to address the ontological regress, and it blocks the explanatory regress only at the cost of making the account inapplicable to non-modular mechanisms. I offer a solution to the explanatory regress t…
An Abductive Theory of Constitution
The first part of this article finds Craver’s mutual manipulability theory (MM) of constitution inadequate, as it definitionally ties constitution to the feasibility of ideal experiments, which, however, are unrealizable in principle. As an alternative, the second part develops an abductive theory of constitution (NDC), which exploits the fact that phenomena and their constituents are unbreakably coupled via common causes. The best explanation fo…
Googling Democracy? New Technologies and the Law of Global Governance
This Afterword to Eyal Benvenisti’s EJIL Foreword, ‘Upholding Democracy amid the Challenges of New Technology: What Role for the Law of Global Governance?’ focuses on two sets of issues that Benvenisti analysed. These issues are the multi-fold dimensions of global administrative law and the role of the law of global governance before new technologies, with particular reference to fake news and disinformation, which is probably one of the most har…
International regulation of historic buildings and nationalism
This article focuses on the (ambiguous) relationships between nationalism and international regulation of historic buildings, namely, the activity of UNESCO in this field. It studies two different forms of UNESCO intervention: the creation of a list of world heritage sites of outstanding universal value, which includes several historic cities and buildings; and UNESCO Recommendations aimed at protecting historic urban landscape. The article shows…
The long and winding road to the establishment of state-museums in Italy
The article examines the 2014 reform of the Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Tourism, with specific regard to museums. The analysis deals with three main issues: the creation of a national system of museums and the recognition of the autonomy of state museums; the institutional models and the legal status of state museums; and the strategic role played by the Ministry’s field offices (the 'soprintendenze')
Muḥammad Ḥusayn Haykal’s Anti-Enlightenment Modernity (1916–1925)
In public discourse and scholarly literature alike, the notions of “modernity,” “Enlightenment” and “the West” are often associated. This article underscores the problems inherent in these associations by focusing on the Egyptian context of the second and third decades of the twentieth century, and in particular on several nationalist articles published by Muḥammad Ḥusayn Haykal (1888–1956). The article contends that Haykal’s writings contributed…
Variable Definition and Independent Components
In the causal modeling literature, it is well known that ill-defined variables may give rise to ambiguous manipulations. Here, we illustrate how ill-defined variables may also induce mistakes in causal inference when standard causal search methods are applied. To address the problem, we introduce a representation framework, which exploits an independent component representation of the data, and demonstrate its potential for detecting ill-defined …
Migration in the Making of the Gulf Space
Conclusion the Gulf Space in Words
Migration in the Making of the Gulf Space
The PC Algorithm and the Inference to Constitution
Gebharter has proposed using one of the best known Bayesian network causal discovery algorithms, PC, to identify the constitutive dependencies underwriting mechanistic explanations. His proposal assumes that mechanistic constitution behaves like deterministic direct causation, such that PC is directly applicable to mixed variable sets featuring both causal and constitutive dependencies. Gebharter claims that such mixed sets, under certain restric…
Confirmation by Robustness Analysis
Some authors claim that minimal models have limited epistemic value (Fumagalli, 2016; Grüne-Yanoff, 2009a). Others defend the epistemic benefits of modelling by invoking the role of robustness analysis for hypothesis confirmation (see, e.g., Levins, 1966; Kuorikoski et al., 2010) but such arguments find much resistance (see, e.g., Odenbaugh & Alexandrova, 2011). In this paper, we offer a Bayesian rationalization and defence of the view that robus…
Constitution, Non-Causal Explanation, and Demarcation
In philosophy of science, constitutive explanations have attracted much attention since Craver’s influential book Explaining the Brain (2007). His Mutual Manipulability (MM) theory of constitution aimed to explicate constitution as a non-causal explanatory relation and to demarcate between constituents and non-constituents. But MM received decisive criticism. In response, Craver et al. (2021) have recently proposed a new theory, called Matched In…
Philosophy (12 works) · Law (10 works) · Political science (10 works) · Computer Science (8 works) · Epistemology (8 works) · Sociology (8 works) · Economics (5 works) · Law (5 works) · Artificial Intelligence (4 works) · Mathematical economics (4 works)