Making Things Happen: A Theory of Causal Explanation (Oxford Studies in the Philosophy of Science)

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. "In Making Things Happen, James Woodward develops a 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 onward."--BOOK JACKET. ## Abstract This book develops a manipulationist theory of causation and explanation: causal and explanatory relationships are relationships that are potentially exploitable for purposes of manipulation and control. The resulting theory is a species of counterfactual theory that (I claim) avoids the difficulties and counterexamples that have infected alternative accounts of causation and explanation, from the Deductive-Nomological model onwards. One of the key concepts in this theory is the notion of an intervention, which is an idealization of the notion of an experimental manipulation that is stripped of its anthropocentric elements. This notion is used to provide a characterization of causal relationships that is non-reductive but also not viciously circular. Relationships that correctly tell us how the value of one variable Y would change under interventions on a second variable Y are invariant. The notion of an invariant relationship is more helpful than the notion of a law of nature (the notion on which philosophers have traditionally relied) in understanding how explanation and causal attribution work in the special sciences.

Woodward's long awaited book is an attempt to construct a comprehensive account of causation explanation that applies to a wide variety of causal and explanatory claims in different areas of science and everyday life. The book engages some of the relevant literature from other disciplines, as Woodward weaves together examples, counterexamples, criticisms, defenses, objections, and replies into a convincing defense of the core of his theory, which is that we can analyze causation by appeal to the notion of manipulation.

Woodward's volume is an attempt to construct a comprehensive account of causation explanation that applies to a wide variety of causal and explanatory claims in different areas of science and everyday life