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Reply to Jim Woodward’s Comments on Wolfgang Spohn’s Laws of Belief

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Wolfgang Spohn
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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. This note locates the core difference of the accounts in the fact that Woodward’s account follows an epistemological order, while Spohn’s follows a conceptual order. This unfolds in five further differences: (i) type- versus token-level causation, (ii) reference to time, (iii) actual/counterfactual intervention versus epistemic/suppositional wiggling, (iv) a circular versus a circle-free conception of the circumstances of a direct causal relation, and (v) absolute versus model-relative causation.

Type
Discussion
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 86 , Issue 4 , October 2019 , pp. 773 - 784
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 Philosophy, University of Konstanz; e-mail: Wolfgang.Spohn@uni-konstanz.de.

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