Experimental Metaphysics: Causation

Abstract

In this chapter, I review some issues in the metaphysics of causation that have been widelydiscussed by experimental philosophers. After I review the work investigating the effects of normality on causal judgment, I discuss the work on action-omission differences, temporal differences (late-preemption), and double-prevention scenarios. I review some explanations for the patterns of causal judgments that experimental philosophers observe in all of these cases. I then identify some new issues for the experimental philosophy of causation and experimental metaphysics more generally.

Modeling confidence in causal judgments.

“…This process of generating and averaging counterfactuals provides a Monte Carlo estimate of the subjective probability that the candidate cause made a difference to the effect (Icard, 2016). Counterfactual sampling models thus have the desirable property that, given an appropriate way of quantifying difference making, the very same mechanism can be used to predict a wide variety of patterns in causal judgments (Henne, 2023).…”

“…So, overall, the Necessity-Sufficiency model says that Joe drawing a green ball makes a difference to him winning a dollar when he draws both a green and a blue ball or when he does not draw a green ball: In other words, it makes a difference except in the case where he draws a green ball, but not a blue ball. Though it was developed specifically to account for normality effects on causal judgment (e.g., Henne, 2023;Kominsky & Phillips, 2020), the Necessity-Sufficiency model has also been shown to account for interactions of normality effects (Gill et al, 2022), temporal recency effects (Henne, Kulesza, et al, 2021), action-omission effects (Henne et al, 2019), as well as judgments in more complex causal structures including double prevention .…”