Natural Selection and Multiple Realisation: A Closer Look

The target of this article is the claim that natural selection accounts for the multiple realisation of biological and psychological kinds. I argue that the explanation actually offered does not provide any insight about the phenomenon since it presupposes multiple realisation as an unexplained premise, and this is what does all the work. The purported explanation mistakenly invokes the ‘indifference’ of selection to structure as an additional explanatorily relevant factor. While such indifference can be explanatory in intentional contexts, it is not a causal factor at all in non-intentional nature. The upshot is that, once the necessary initial assumption about heterogeneity is accepted, there is no further explanation to do.     

An Inferential Model of Scientific Understanding

In this article I argue that two current accounts of scientific understanding are incorrect and I propose an alternative theory. My new account draws on recent research in cognitive psychology which reveals the importance of making causal and logical inferences on the basis of incoming information. To understand a phenomenon we need to make particular kinds of inferences concerning the explanations we are given. Specifically, we come to understand a phenomenon scientifically by developing mental models that incorporate the correct causal and logical properties responsible for the causes or logical properties of the phenomenon being explained.     

Causes As Difference‐Makers For Processes

It is natural to think of causes as difference‐makers. What exact difference causes make, however, is an open question. In this paper, I argue that the right way of understanding difference‐making is in terms of causal processes: causes make a difference to a causal process that leads to the effect. I will show that this way of understanding difference‐making nicely captures the distinction between causing an outcome and helping determine how the outcome happens and, thus, explains why causation is not transitive. Moreover, the theory handles tricky cases that are problematic for competing accounts of difference‐making.     

Moore’s Paradox and Moral Motivation

Assertions of statements such as ‘it’s raining, but I don’t believe it’ are standard examples of what is known as Moore’s paradox. Here I consider moral equivalents of such statements, statements wherein individuals affirm moral judgments while also expressing motivational indifference to those judgments (such as ‘hurting animals for fun is wrong, but I don’t care’). I argue for four main conclusions concerning such statements: 1. Such statements are genuinely paradoxical, even if not contradictory. 2. This paradoxicality can be traced to a form of epistemic self-defeat that also explains the paradoxicality of ordinary Moore-paradoxical statements. 3. Although a simple form of internalism about moral judgment and motivation can explain the paradoxicality of these moral equivalents, a more plausible explanation can be provided that does not rely on this simple form of internalism. 4. The paradoxicality of such statements suggests a more credible understanding of the thesis that those who are not motivated by their moral judgments are irrational.     

Models of covariation-based causal judgment: A review and synthesis

Causal judgment is assumed to play a central role in prediction, control, and explanation. Here, we consider the function or functions that map contingency information concerning the relationship between a single cue and a single outcome onto causal judgments. We evaluate normative accounts of causal induction and report the findings of an extensive meta-analysis in which we used a cross-validation model-fitting method and carried out a qualitative analysis of experimental trends in order to compare a number of alternative models. The best model to emerge from this competition is one in which judgments are based on the difference between the amount of confirming and disconfirming evidence. A rational justification for the use of this model is proposed.     

Sufficiency and Necessity Assumptions in Causal Structure Induction

Research on human causal induction has shown that people have general prior assumptions about causal strength and about how causes interact with the background. We propose that these prior assumptions about the parameters of causal systems do not only manifest themselves in estimations of causal strength or the selection of causes but also when deciding between alternative causal structures. In three experiments, we requested subjects to choose which of two observable variables was the cause and which the effect. We found strong evidence that learners have interindividually variable but intraindividually stable priors about causal parameters that express a preference for causal determinism (sufficiency or necessity; Experiment 1). These priors predict which structure subjects preferentially select. The priors can be manipulated experimentally (Experiment 2) and appear to be domain‐general (Experiment 3). Heuristic strategies of structure induction are suggested that can be viewed as simplified implementations of the priors.     

Causality assessment in epidemiology

Epidemiology relies upon a broad interpretation of determinism. This paper discusses analogies with the evolution of the concept of cause in physics, and analyzes the classical nine criteria proposed by Sir Austin Bradford Hill for causal assessment. Such criteria fall into the categories of enumerative induction, eliminative induction, deduction and analogy. All of these four categories are necessary for causal assessment and there is no natural hierarchy among them, although a deductive analysis of the study design is preliminary to any assessment.     

Causal beliefs and empirical evidence

Causal beliefs often facilitate decision making. However, strong causal beliefs can also lead to neglect of relevant empirical evidence causing errors in risky decision making (e.g., medical, financial). We investigated the impact of pre-training and post-experience on the evaluation of empirical evidence in a two-alternative medical diagnostic task. Participants actively searched for information about two patients on the basis of four available cues. The first experiment indicated that pre-training can weaken the strong influence of causal beliefs reducing neglect of empirical evidence. The second experiment demonstrated that increasing amounts of empirical evidence can improve people's ability to decide in favor of a correct diagnosis. The current research converges with other recent work to clarify key mechanisms and boundary conditions shaping the influence of causal beliefs and empirical evidence in decisions and causal judgments.     

Natural Selection: A Case for the Counterfactual Approach

This paper investigates the conception of causation required in order to make sense of natural selection as a causal explanation of changes in traits or allele frequencies. It claims that under a counterfactual account of causation, natural selection is constituted by the causal relevance of traits and alleles to the variation in traits and alleles frequencies. The “statisticalist” view of selection (Walsh, Matthen, Ariew, Lewens) has shown that natural selection is not a cause superadded to the causal interactions between individual organisms. It also claimed that the only causation at work is those aggregated individual interactions, natural selection being only predictive and explanatory, but it is implicitly committed to a process-view of causation. I formulate a counterfactual construal of the causal statements underlying selectionist explanations, and show that they hold because of the reference they make to ecological reliable factors. Considering case studies, I argue that this counterfactual view of causal relevance proper to natural selection captures more salient features of evolutionary explanations than the statisticalist view, and especially makes sense of the difference between selection and drift. I eventually establish equivalence between causal relevance of traits and natural selection itself as a cause.     

因果推理中的亚决定性

“亚决定性”是知识论和科学哲学中一个重要的概念。对这个概念的一种阐释是把它对应于可靠探索的不可能性。就是说,在一个（经验）问题中,给定一些公设和一些供选择的理论或假说,如果逻辑上不可能找到一种理论选择的方法能满足一定的可靠或成功标准,那么相对于这个标准就存在亚决定性。从这个观点看,亚决定性总是相对于一个问题设定,尤其是公设和成功标准而言的。本文从这个角度对近来的统计因果推理研究作一番梳理。首先,基于数理统计中的一致性概念,我会讨论和分析一系列可应用于因果推理的成功标准。对每一个标准,我会用一个相对简单的条件来刻画它对应的亚决定性。然后我对文献里一部分重要的结果作一个综述,以澄清什么样的公设可以消除什么样的亚决定性。     

A Computational Theory of Learning Causal Relationships

I present a cognitive model of the human ability to acquire causal relationships. I report on experimental evidence demonstrating that human learners acquire accurate causal relationships more rapidly when training examples are consistent with a general theory of causality. This article describes a learning process that uses a general theory of causality as background knowledge. The learning process, which I call theory-driven learning (TDL), hypothesizes causal relationships consistent both with observed data and the general theory of causality. TDL accounts for data on both the rate at which human learners acquire causal relationships, and the types of causal relationships they acquire. Experiments with TDL demonstrate the advantage of TDL for acquiring causal relationships over similarity-based approaches to learning: Fewer examples are required to learn an accurate relationship.     

Spontaneous discounting of availability in frequency judgment tasks

Discounting is a causal-reasoning phenomenon in which increasing confidence in the likelihood of a particular cause decreases confidence in the likelihood of all other causes. This article provides evidence that individuals apply discounting principles to making causal attributions about internal cognitive states. In particular, the three studies reported show that individuals will fail to use the availability heuristic in frequency estimations when salient causal explanations for availability exist. Experiment 1 shows that fame is used as a cue for discounting in estimates of surname frequency. Experiment 2 demonstrates that individuals discount the availability of their own last name. Experiment 3, which used individuals' initials in a letter-frequency estimation task, demonstrates that simple priming of alternative causal models leads to discounting of availability. Discounting of cognitive states can occur spontaneously, even when alternative causal models are never explicitly provided.     

How Could There Be True Causal Claims Without There Being Special Causal Facts in the World?

Some philosophers of physics recently expressed their skepticism about causation (Norton 2003b, 2007). However, this is not new. The view that causation does not refer to any ontological category perhaps can be attributed to Hume, Kant and Russell. On the other hand, some philosophers (Wesley Salmon and Phil Dowe) view causation as a physical process and some others (Cartwright) view causation as making claims about capacities possessed by objects. The issue about the ontological status of causal claims involves issues concerning the ontological status of capacity, modality and dispositional claims. In this paper, my goal is to show that without engaging metaphysical debates about the ontological status of causal claims, it can be shown that we can objectively assign truth values to these statements. I argue that for causal claims to be objective we don't need to postulate the existence of special facts (specific to causal claims) in addition to ordinary physical facts described by physical theories. This, I think, is enough to justify the usefulness of this concept in certain branches (may be all) of science. Once this is achieved, there is no need to engage in unnecessary metaphysical debates. So, even if advanced physical theories don't mention this notion, causal reasoning can still be important in understanding the world not in the sense that science discovers special ontological category called causation but in the sense that we come to know certain facts about the world.     

On the failure to eliminate hypotheses in a conceptual task

This investigation examines the extent to which intelligent young adults seek (i) confirming evidence alone (enumerative induction) or (ii) confirming and discontinuing evidence (eliminative induction), in order to draw conclusions in a simple conceptual task. The experiment is designed so that use of confirming evidence alone will almost certainly lead to erroneous conclusions because (i) the correct concept is entailed by many more obvious ones, and (ii) the universe of possible instances (numbers) is infinite.

Six out of 29 subjects reached the correct conclusion without previous incorrect ones, 13 reached one incorrect conclusion, nine reached two or more incorrect conclusions, and one reached no conclusion. The results showed that those subjects, who reached two or more incorrect conclusions, were unable, or unwilling to test their hypotheses. The implications are discussed in relation to scientific thinking.     

Waste Culture and Isolation: Prisons,Toilets, and Gender Segregation

After reviewing the use of isolation in US prisons and public restrooms to confine transgender people in solitary cells and single‐occupancy bathrooms, I propose an explanatory theory of eliminative space. I argue that prisons and toilets are eliminative spaces: that is, spaces of waste management that use layers of isolation to sanctify social or individual waste, at the outer and inner limits of society. As such, they function according to an eliminative logic. Eliminative logic, as I develop it, involves three distinct but interrelated mechanisms: 1) purification of the social center, through 2) iterative segregation, presuming and enforcing 3) the reduced relationality of marginal persons. By evaluating the historical development and contemporary function of prisons and restrooms, I demonstrate that both seek to protect the gender binary through waves of segregation by sex, race, disability, and gender identity. I further argue that both assume the thin relationality of, in this case, transgender people, who are conceived of as impervious to the effects of isolation and thus always already isolable. I conclude that, if we are to counter the violence of these isolation practices, we not only need to think holistically about eliminative spaces and logic, but also to richly reconceptualize relationality.     

Book Reviews

In this paper the strategy for the eliminative reduction of the alethic modalities suggested by John Venn is outlined and it is shown to anticipate certain related contemporary empiricistic and nominalistic projects. Venn attempted to reduce the alethic modalities to probabilities, and thus suggested a promising solution to the nagging issue of the inclusion of modal statements in empiricistic philosophical systems. However, despite the promise that this suggestion held for laying the ‘ghost of modality’ to rest, this general approach, tempered modal eliminativism, is shown to be inadequate for that task.     

Intentions and Causes, Actions and Right Actions

I argue in this essay that belief/desire explanations are not logically true and not causal, and further that the antecedent of a true belief/desire conditional cannot be strengthened in such a way as to transform it into a true causal statement. I also argue that belief/desire explanations are not dispensable: they are presupposed in our justifications of scientific claims. The proposal is not that psychological determinism is false, but that some at least of our activities are not describable in causal terms. These arguments prepare the ground for a puzzle. If all human intentional behaviour is caused, then all actual linkages between psychological states and behaviour should be expressed in causal statements. But neither the action of asserting a causal statement nor the action of justifying the assertion can be described as the result of a cause. Therefore if one accepts that scientific claims can be justified, not all linkages between psychological states and subsequent action are expressible in causal statements. I do not offer a solution to this puzzle.     

Can We Turn a Blind Eye to Eliminativism?

In this paper I shall reply to two arguments that Stephen Stich (1990; 1991; 1996) has recently put forward against the thesis of eliminative materialism. In a nutshell, Stich argues that (i) the thesis of eliminative materialism, according to which propositional attitudes don't exist, is neither true nor false, and that (ii) even if it were true, that would be philosophically uninteresting. To support (i) and (ii) Stich relies on two premises: (a) that the job of a theory of reference is to make explicit the tacit theory of reference which underlies our intuitions about the notion of reference itself; and (b) that our intuitive notion of reference is a highly idiosyncratic one. In this paper I shall address Stich's anti-eliminativist claims (i) and (ii). I shall argue that even if we agreed with premises (a) and (b), that would lend no support whatsoever to (i) and (ii).     

Faith and the practising analyst

Abstract: In this brief essay, I reflect on three questions: What is ‘faith’ in a modern and post‐modern cultural context? Do I, a Jungian analyst, have ‘faith’ or do I not? Does having ‘faith’ or not make a difference in the practice of analysis? I make reference to Jung's understanding of ‘faith’ and his frequent disclaimers about making metaphysical claims. I conclude that a post‐credal ‘faith’ is possible for contemporary Jungian analysts, that I do have such a faith personally, and that in my experience this makes a significant difference in analytic practice at least with some patients. Traditional faith statements must be translated into depth psychological terms, however, in order for them to be applicable in post‐modern, multicultural contexts.     

Causation and Induction1

The connection between views about causation and attempts to justify inductive reasoning is sufficiently close that some philosophers² have taken success at the latter as a litmus test for the truth of the former. I do not agree with this approach. Like Hume, I believe that the nature of causal connections must be understood prior to, and independently of, solutions to the problem of induction. Like Hume, I also hold that the problem of induction cannot be solved if Hume's analysis of causal connections is correct. But unlike Hume, I believe that that analysis is incorrect. However, I shall not attempt to establish this crucial thesis here. I mention it because this paper presupposes it. Hume's difficulty about causation must—and can—be faced head-on. There are phenomenological grounds for affirming that we sometimes directly experience nonlogical, necessary connections between events. I shall only briefly summarize these grounds, which will be argued for in detail elsewhere. The purpose of this paper is to explore the extent to which a necessitarian theory of causation can bring the problem of induction closer to solution.