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On Wolfgang Spohn’s Laws of Belief

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Abstract

This is one of a pair of discussion notes comparing some features of the account of causation in Wolfgang Spohn’s Laws of Belief with the “interventionist” account in James Woodward’s Making Things Happen. Despite striking similarities there are also important differences. These include (i) the “epistemic” orientation of Spohn’s account as opposed to the worldly or “ontic” orientation of the interventionist account, (ii) Spohn’s focus on token-level causal claims in contrast to the primary interventionist focus on type-level claims, (iii) the role of temporal information in accounting for causal asymmetry, and (iv) the extent to which causal claims are “frame relative.”

Type
Discussion
Copyright
Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

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To contact the author, please write to: Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Pittsburgh; e-mail: jfw@pitt.edu.

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