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Prof. Ned Hall (Harvard University)-"Causation and the aims of inquiry"

Thursday, February 18, 2016, 03:00pm - 05:00pm

"Causation and the aims of inquiry"
Abstract:
Interventionist approaches to causation promise a very satisfying answer to a very general question about the aims of scientific inquiry: Suppose we grant that scientific inquiry aims to discover and describe the causal structure of the world; what philosophical account of causal structure will make this claim a true and illuminating thing to say? I will begin by explaining why I think interventionism – at least, when unpacked in terms of an explicitly reductionist account of the interventionist counterfactuals that are at its core – is so attractive and promising. Then I will shift gears, and raise what seem to me to be two deep, unsolved problems about its foundations. The first concerns the causal status of localized conditions that are, in a certain sense, constantly ‘monitored’ by their environments. The second concerns the causal status of conditions protracted in time.
Location Philosophy Seminar Room