Talk: Michael Waldmann (Göttingen)

Title:

Intuitions about Causal Mechanisms

Abstract:

Currently in both psychology and philosophy two frameworks of causal reasoning compete. Whereas dependency theories (e.g., causal Bayes nets) focus on causally motivated statistical or counterfactual dependencies between events, dispositional theories model causation as an interaction between causal participants endowed with intrinsic dispositions or capacities. Three projects will be presented in which we demonstrated that different types of intuitions about causal dispositions or capacities guide background assumptions about the structure and parameters of causal Bayes nets. The first project showed that force dynamic assumptions about agents and patients moderate the degree of Markov violations in Bayes net representations. The second project demonstrated that abstract features of the cause generated different intuitions about causal strength distributions in causal networks. The third project, inspired by Nancy Cartwright's theory of nomological machines, examined the ability of participants to generate causal dependency intuitions from causal capacities of components of static devices and their ability to transfer capacity knowledge between different devices.