Making Things Happen: A Theory of Causal Explanation

by James Woodward

Overview

In Making Things Happen, James Woodward develops a new and ambitious comprehensive theory of causation and explanation that draws on literature from a variety of disciplines and which applies to a wide variety of claims in science and everyday life. His theory is a manipulationist account, proposing that causal and explanatory relationships are relationships that are potentially exploitable for purposes of manipulation and control. This account has its roots in the commonsense idea that causes are means for bringing about effects; but it also draws on a long tradition of work in experimental design, econometrics, and statistics.

Woodward shows how these ideas may be generalized to other areas of science from the social scientific and biomedical contexts for which they were originally designed. He also provides philosophical foundations for the manipulationist approach, drawing out its implications, comparing it with alternative approaches, and defending it from common criticisms. In doing so, he shows how the manipulationist account both illuminates important features of successful causal explanation in the natural and social sciences, and avoids the counterexamples and difficulties that infect alternative approaches, from the deductive-nomological model onwards.

Making Things Happen will interest philosophers working in the philosophy of science, the philosophy of social science, and metaphysics, and as well as anyone interested in causation, explanation, and scientific methodology.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780195189537
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	10/27/2005
Series:	Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Science
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	432
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.93(d)
Lexile:	1680L (what's this?)

About the Author

James Woodward is the author of a number of articles in the philosophy of science. He has taught at the California Institute of Technology since 1983 where he is presently the J.O. and Juliette Koepfli Professor of Humanities.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction and Preview2. Causation and Manipulation3. Interventions, Agency, and Counterfactuals4. Causal Explanation: Background and Criticism5. A Counterfactual Theory of Causal Explanation6. Invariance7. Causal Interpretation in Structural Models8. The Causal Mechanical and Unificationist Models of Explanation

Editorial Reviews

"Making Things Happen contains an elaborate presentation and defense of Woodward's manipulability theory of causation and causal explanation, a powerful alternative to extant theories in the field...The book contains an enormous wealth of ideas and detailed arguments...an extremely important contribution to the debates about causation and explanation. It will become an indispensable reference for anyone who wants to work on these topics."—Henk W. de Regt, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

"Careful, detailed, often eloquent."—Clark Glymour, British Journal for Philosophy of Science

From the Publisher