Recent calls to action for competency-based training, evaluation, and credentialing of mental health profes sionals focus heavily on instilling the knowledge and skills needed for performing evidence-based assessment and treatment. We propose the content of a companion training curriculum in clinical decision-making that reflects the pervasive and indispensible role of causal reasoning in clinical practice. Contents of the proposed curriculum include review and discussion of the following areas: (a) domains in which practitioners are routinely required to make and evaluate causal inferences; (b) definitions of key concepts related to causality and errors in causal reasoning; (c) guidelines for evaluating the internal and external validity of findings in empirical studies; (d) guidelines for formulating and evaluating working theories of the origin and/or maintenance of client presenting problems; and (e) methods for planning, targeting, and evaluating interven tions. This curriculum is designed to help mental health practitioners use causal modeling to enhance case conceptualization, develop intervention objectives, and prioritize and target foci of interventions that use evidence-based treatments or practice elements. Practitioners who use causal modeling to guide clinical practice are, in effect, deliberately generating causal hypotheses, implementing causal experiments, and evaluating outcomes as they monitor client response to intervention. Causal reasoning competencies may be enhanced through application of causal modeling diagrams to clinical case examples. Development and implementation of a causal reasoning curriculum will provide a basis for "value-added" research regarding its benefit to practitioners in terms of enhanced clinical competencies, decisions, and improved client outcomes. . His professional interests include evidence-based assessment and practice; professional education, and the conceptualization, measurement, and treatment of traumatized and be reaved youth. J e s s e R. S t e in b e r g received his PhD in philosophy from the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is currently a faculty member in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His areas of profes sional interest include the philosophy of science, philosophy of mind, meta physics, and ethics.A la n M. S t e in b e r g received his PhD in philosophy from Cornell Univer sity. He is currently Associate Director of the . His research has focused on the assessment and treatment of traumatized children and adolescents, and behavioral health responses to disasters. C o r r e s p o n d e n c e c o n c e r n in g t h is a r t ic l e should be addressed to Christopher M. Layne,

It is generally agreed that dispositions cannot be analyzed in terms of simple subjunctive conditionals (because of what are called ''masked dispositions'' and ''finkish dispositions''). I here defend a qualified subjunctive account of dispositions according to which an object is disposed to U when conditions C obtain if and only if, if conditions C were to obtain, then the object would U ceteris paribus. I argue that this account does not fall prey to the objections that have been raised in the literature.Keywords Disposition Á Mask Á Fink Á Subjunctive Á Counterfactual Á Ceteris paribus 1 Dispositions, finks and masks When we say of an object that it has a particular dispositional property it might seem that we are making a conditional claim. That is, for example, when we say of Tony that he is disposed to get angry when his car does not start, we seem to mean something like: if Tony's car does not start, then Tony will get angry. Similarly, when we say of a spoonful of sugar that it is disposed to dissolve in coffee, we seem to mean something like: if the sugar is put in coffee, then it will dissolve. But, as many have pointed out, we ought not think of the conditional as a material conditional. 1 A golf club is not disposed to dissolve in water simply because it is never put in water. So perhaps we ought to analyze dispositions instead in terms of

We present a new Web middleware architecture that allows users to customize their view of the Web for optimal interaction and system operation when using non-traditional resource-limited client machines such as wireless PDAs (personal digital assistants). Web Stream Customizers (WSC) are dynamically deployable software modules and can be strategically located between client and server to achieve improvements i n performance, reliability, or security. An important design feature is that Customizers provide two points of control in the communication path between client and server, supporting adaptive system-based and content-based customization. Our architecture exploits HTTP's proxy capabilities, allowing Customizers to be seamlessly integrated with the basic Web transaction model. We describe the WSC architecture and implementation, and illustrate its use with three non-trivial, adaptive Customizer applications that we have built. We show that the overhead in our implementation is small and tolerable, and is outweighed by the benefits that Customizers provide.

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In defending the scientific legitimacy of ceteris paribus qualified causal generalizations, we situate and specify the reference of the ceteris paribus proviso within a fundamental causal framework consisting of causal agents, pathways of influence, mediators, moderators, and causal consequences. In so doing, we provide an explication of the reference and utility of the ceteris paribus proviso in terms of mediators and moderators as these constitute the range of factors that can impinge on the relation between cause and effect. We argue that the conceptual causal roadmap embodied by the ceteris paribus qualification serves as a schematic template for the ongoing identification of causally relevant factors and plays an indispensable heuristic role in advancing scientific inquiry into causal relations. We then provide guidelines for differentiating between acceptable and unacceptable uses of ceteris paribus and describe how mediators and moderators conceptually encompassed by the ceteris paribus proviso can be employed in evaluating the meaning and acceptability of proposed ceteris paribus causal generalizations, as well serve as a guide to investigators in the process of designing studies to identify a causal agent, mediators, moderators, pathways of influence, and causal consequences.