Making Things Happen

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.