Robert Northcott's Papers
My
research focuses on causal explanation, especially the notions of
degree of causation and explanation. I use the machinery I have
developed for that to address longstanding controversies in science,
especially biology. I see the two aspects, namely philosophy of science
and metaphysics, as necessarily developing in parallel, and as in turn
informing and being informed by scientific practice. This requires work
in all three areas: metaphysics, and both theortical and applied
philosophy of science.
I received a University of Missouri Research
Board award for
spring and fall 2008 (worth $20,000), for the project 'Measuring causal
strength in biology'. I received an UMSL Research Award
worth $7,000 in fall 2006 for the project 'Causes in science and
philosophy'. I have also received UMSL travel grants in each of the
academic years 2005/6, 2006/7, 2007/8, and 2008/9.
(Quick links In more detail Works in progress Popular articles)
Quick links
J10) ‘Verisimilitude: a causal approach’ Synthese, forthcoming. (This is a late draft.)
J9) ‘On Lewis, Schaffer and the non-reductive evaluation of counterfactuals’ Theoria, forthcoming. (This is a late draft.)
J8) ‘Is actual difference making actually different?’ Journal of Philosophy, forthcoming. (This is a late draft.)
J7) Natural-born determinists: a new defense of causation as probability-raising Philosophical Studies, forthcoming
J6) Weighted explanations in history Philosophy
of the Social Sciences 2008, 76-96
J5) Can ANOVA measure causal strength? Quarterly
Review of Biology 2008, 47-55
J4) Causation and
contrast classes Philosophical
Studies 2008, 111-123
J3) Causal efficacy
and the analysis of variance Biology
and Philosophy 2006, 253-276
J2) Pearson’s wrong
turning: against statistical measures of causal efficacy Philosophy
of Science 2005, 900-912
J1) Comparing apples
with oranges Analysis 2005, 12-18
S3) Progress in economics: lessons from the spectrum
auctions Oxford
Handbook of Philosophy of Economics, forthcoming
S2) Review of ‘The
Scientific Study of Society’ by Max Steuer Economics and Philosophy 2004, 375-381
P2) Is it bad luck or the ref's fault? to appear in Ted Richards (ed), Soccer and Philosophy (Open Court, expected 2010)
P1) The Irrational
Game: why there’s no perfect system in Eric Bronson (ed), Poker and
Philosophy (Open Court,
2006), pp105-115
In more detail
J10) Verisimilitude: a causal approach (This is a late draft.)
Synthese, forthcoming.
I present a new definition of verisimilitude, framed in
terms of causes. Roughly speaking, according to it a scientific model is
approximately true if it captures accurately the strengths of the causes present in any
given situation. Against much of the literature, I argue that any satisfactory
account of verisimilitude must inevitably restrict its judgments to
context-specific models rather than general theories. We may still endorse -
and only need - a relativized notion of scientific progress, understood now not
as global advance but rather as the mastering of particular problems. This also
sheds new light on longstanding difficulties surrounding language-dependence,
and models committed to false ontologies.
J9) On Lewis, Schaffer and the non-reductive evaluation of counterfactuals (This is a late draft.)
Theoria, forthcoming.
In a 2004 Analysis article, Jonathan Schaffer proposes an ingenious amendment to
David Lewis’s semantics for counterfactuals. This amendment explicitly invokes
the notion of causal independence, thus giving up Lewis’s ambitions for a
reductive counterfactual account of causation. But in return, it rescues
Lewis’s semantics from extant counterexamples. I present a new counterexample that defeats even
Schaffer’s amendment. Further, I argue that a better approach would be to
follow the causal modelling literature and evaluate counterfactuals via an
explicit postulated causal structure. This alternative approach easily resolves
the new counterexample, as well as all the previous ones. Up to now, its
perceived drawback relative to Lewis’s scheme has been its non-reductiveness.
But since the same drawback applies equally to Schaffer’s amended scheme, this
becomes no longer a point of comparative disadvantage.
J8) Is actual difference making actually different? (This is a late draft.)
Journal of Philosophy, forthcoming.
This paper responds to Kenneth Waters’s recent account of actual difference making. Among other things, I argue that although Waters is right that researchers
may sometimes be justified in focusing on genes rather than other causes
of phenotypic traits, he is wrong that the apparatus of actual
difference makers overcomes the traditional causal parity thesis.
J7) Natural-born determinists: a new defense of causation as probability-raising
Philosophical Studies, forthcoming
A definition of causation as probability-raising
is threatened by two kinds of counterexample:
first, when a cause lowers the probability of its effect; and second,
when the probability of an effect is raised by a non-cause. I present an account that deals
successfully with problem cases of both these kinds. In doing so, I also
explore some implications of incorporating into the metaphysical investigation
considerations of causal psychology. In particular, if we interpret the formal account as a theory of causal judgment rather
than of causation itself, that enables us indirectly to defend a slightly different,
and more desirable, metaphysical account than otherwise. The
psychological detour thus pays metaphysical dividends.
J6) Weighted explanations in history
Philosophy of the Social Sciences 38.1, March 2008,
pp76-96
Weighted
explanations, whereby some causes are deemed more or less
important than others, are ubiquitous in historical studies and indeed everyday
life. But it
turns out that furnishing a good account of them is a surprisingly
delicate task, and one so far treated either unsatisfactorily or not at
all in the
explanation and philosophy of history literatures. As a result, it is
still unclear exactly what a historian is claiming when offering a
weighted explanation, and
also unclear what kinds of evidence are relevant to assessing such
claims. Drawing from influential recent work
on causation and causal explanation, I develop a new definition of causal-explanatory
strength. This yields a principled way to incorporate pragmatic aspects of
explanation, and makes clear exactly which aspects of explanatory
weighting are subjective and which objective. One payoff is that many widespread claims and
assumptions regarding weighted explanations are now revealed, surprisingly, to
be either false or confused.
J5) Can ANOVA measure causal strength?
Quarterly
Review of Biology 83.1, March 2008, pp47-55
The statistical technique of analysis of
variance is often used by biologists as a measure of causal factors’ relative
strength or importance. I argue that it is a tool ill suited to this purpose,
on several grounds. I suggest a superior alternative, and outline some
implications. I finish with a diagnosis of the source of error – an unwitting
inheritance of bad philosophy that now requires the remedy of better
philosophy.
J4) Causation and
contrast classes
Philosophical Studies 39.1, May 2008, pp111-123
I argue that causation is a contrastive relation: c-rather-than-C*
causes e-rather-than-E*, where C*
and E* are contrast classes associated respectively with actual events c and e. I explain why this is an improvement on the traditional binary
view, and develop a detailed definition. It turns out that causation is only
well defined in ‘uniform’ cases, where either all or none of the members of C*
are related appropriately to members of E*.
J3) Causal efficacy
and the analysis of variance
Biology and Philosophy 21.2, March 2006, pp253-276
The causal impact of genes and environment on any one biological trait
are inextricably entangled, and consequently it is widely accepted that
it makes no sense in singleton cases to privilege either factor for
particular credit. On the other hand, at a population level it may well
be the case that one of the factors is reponsible for more variation
than the other. Standard methodological practice in biology uses the
statistical technique of analysis of variance to measure this latter kind of causal efficacy. In this paper, I argue that:
1) analysis of variance is in fact badly suited to this role; and
2) a superior alternative definition is available that readily reconciles both the entangled-singleton and the population-variation senses of causal efficacy.
J2) Pearson’s wrong
turning: against statistical measures of causal efficacy
Philosophy of Science 72.5, December 2005, pp900-912
Standard statistical measures of strength
of association, although pioneered by Pearson deliberately to be acausal,
nowadays are routinely used to measure causal efficacy. But their acausal
origins have left them ill suited to this latter purpose. I distinguish between
two different conceptions of causal efficacy, and argue that:
1) Both conceptions
can be useful
2) The statistical measures only
attempt to capture the first of them
3) They are not fully successful
even at this
4) An alternative definition based
more squarely on causal thinking not only captures the second conception, it
can also capture the first one better too.
J1) Comparing apples
with oranges
Analysis 65.1, January 2005, pp12-18
'If two men lay bricks to build a wall, we may quite fairly measure their
contributions by counting the number laid by each; but if one mixes the mortar
and the other lays the bricks, it would be absurd to measure their relative
quantitative contributions by measuring the volumes of bricks and of mortar' (Richard Lewontin). Thus: 'For it to make sense to ask
what (or how much) a cause contributes to an effect, the various causes must be
commensurable in the way they produce their effects' (Elliott Sober). These claims sound reasonable but I show on the contrary that, for their contributions to be comparable, it is neither necessary nor
sufficient that two causes also be commensurable. Rather, in a sense that I discuss, what really matters is that they be separable.
S3) Progress in economics: lessons from the spectrum
auctions
to appear in Harold Kincaid and Don Ross (eds), Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Economics
(co-authored with Anna Alexandrova)
The 1994
US spectrum auction is now a paradigmatic
case of the successful use of microeconomic theory for policy-making.
We use a detailed analysis of it to review standard accounts in
philosophy of science of how
idealized models are connected to messy reality. We show that in order
to understand what made the design of the spectrum auction successful, a new
such account is required, and we present it here. Of especial interest
is the light this sheds on the issue of progress in economics. In
particular, it enables us to get clear on
exactly what has been progressing, and on exactly what theory has – and has not
– contributed to that. This in turn has important implications for just
what it is about economic theory that we should value.
Works in progress and under review
I am very happy to send these papers upon request.
‘Walsh on causes and evolution’ (conditionally accepted by Philosophy of Science)
This paper is a response to Denis Walsh's influential defenses of the statisticalist (i.e. non-causalist) position regarding
the forces of evolution. I defend the causalist view
against his objections. I argue that the heart of the issue lies in the
nature of non-additive causation. Detailed
consideration of that turns out to defuse Walsh’s ‘description-dependence’
critique of causalism. In particular, suppose a population is exhaustively
partitioned into sub-populations. Then because selection and drift are
non-additive, there is no contradiction in their strengths being simultaneously
low in each sub-population and yet high in the population as a whole.
Nevertheless, Walsh’s work does suggest a basis for reconciliation between
the two competing views.
-- ‘Explanatory strength’. This paper is the culmination of a research
interest of mine of several years, namely how best to analyze individual causes explaining outcomes only partially,
and, closely related to that, how causal responsibility for
some outcome should be shared out between different causes. I have
found the issue to be ubiquitous across science. Here, I extend
standard approaches by tackling explicitly - for a range of cases - the
relatively neglected issue of explanandum-dependence. This establishes
a novel distinction, between what I label causal strength and
explanatory strength. Among other benefits, it also sheds new
light on the relation between
causal explanation and causation itself.
-- ‘Causation and genetic drift’. I argue that most existing analyses
of drift either exaggerate the extent to which it is
(causal-)explanatory, or else err the opposite way by denying that it
can be explanatory at all.
-- ‘Symmetric overdetermination’.
I present a novel analysis of this venerable paradox that grows out of
my work on causal strength, in particular when that is applied to
situations of non-additive causal interaction.
--
Philosophical methodology. I am interested in what experimental
philosophy might or might not be able to contribute to debates in
metaphysics. I explore this in the context of a couple of issues about
causation.
Popular articles
P2) Is it bad luck or the ref's fault?
to appear in Ted Richards (ed), Soccer and Philosophy (Open Court, expected 2010)
I discuss classic issues surrounding luck, determinism and probability in the context of the penalty shoot-outs used in football’s
World Cup. Can it ever make objective sense to blame an outcome on bad
luck? I go on to discuss whether we can legitimately pin the blame on
any one factor at all, such as a referee. This takes us into issues
surrounding the apportioning of causal responsibility.
P1) The Irrational
Game: why there’s no perfect system
in Eric Bronson (ed), Poker and
Philosophy (Open Court,
2006), pp105-115
I use poker
as a convenient illustration of probability,
determinism and counterfactuals. More originally, I also discuss the
roles of rationality versus psychological hunches, and explain why even in
principle game theory cannot provide us the panacea of a perfect winning
srategy.
(N.B. The document I link to here is slightly longer than the abbreviated version that appears in the book, and also differs in a few other minor details.)