Changing Minds ― Epistemic Interventions in Causal Reasoning

Did Tom’s use of nuts in the dish cause Billy’s allergic reaction? According to counterfactual theories of causation, an agent is judged a cause to the extent that their action made a difference to the outcome (Gerstenberg, Goodman, Lagnado, & Tenenbaum, 2020; Gerstenberg, Halpern, & Tenenbaum, 2015; Halpern, 2016; Hitchcock & Knobe, 2009). In this paper, we argue for the integration of epistemic states into current counterfactual accounts of causation. In the case of ignorant causal agents, we demonstrate that people’s counterfactual reasoning primarily targets the agent’s epistemic state – what the agent doesn’t know –, and their epistemic actions – what they could have done to know – rather than the agent’s actual causal action. In four experiments, we show that people’s causal judgment as well as their reasoning about alternatives is sensitive to the epistemic conditions of a causal agent: Knowledge vs. ignorance (Experiment 1), self-caused vs. externally caused ignorance (Experiment 2), the number of epistemic actions (Experiment 3), and the epistemic context (Experiment 4). We see two advantages in integrating epistemic states into causal models and counterfactual frameworks. First, assuming the intervention on indirect, epistemic causes might allow us to explain why people attribute decreased causality to ignorant vs. knowing causal agents. Moreover, causal agents’ epistemic states pick out those factors that can be controlled or manipulated in order to achieve desirable future outcomes, reflecting the forward-looking dimension of causality. We discuss our findings in the broader context of moral and causal cognition.

In defence of explanatory realism

Explanatory realism is the view that explanations work by providing information about relations of productive determination such as causation or grounding. The view has gained considerable popularity in the last decades, especially in the context of metaphysical debates about non-causal explanation. What makes the view particularly attractive is that it fits nicely with the idea that not all explanations are causal whilst avoiding an implausible pluralism about explanation. Another attractive feature of the view is that it allows explanation to be a partially epistemic, context-dependent phenomenon. In spite of its attractiveness, explanatory realism has recently been subject to criticism. In particular, Taylor (Philos Stud 175(1):197–219, 2018). has presented four types of explanation that the view allegedly cannot account for. This paper defends explanatory realism against Taylor’s challenges. We will show that Taylor’s counterexamples are either explanations that turn out to provide information about entities standing in productive determination relations or that they are not genuine explanations in the first place.

Acids and Rust: A New Perspective on the Chemical Revolution

This paper uses scientific perspectivism as a lens for understanding acid experiments from the Chemical Revolution. I argue that this account has several advantages over several recent interpretations of this period, interpretations that do not neatly capture some of the historical experiments on acids. The perspectival view is distinctive in that it avoids discontinuity, allows for the rational resolution of disagreement, and is sensitive to the historical epistemic context.

Epistemic Arena

This chapter presents details of the setting that constitute the epistemic context of, not only Confucian heritage and Western cultures, but of all humanity. Both Eastern and Western cultures and civilizations are situated in the context of human existence. Conditions that are common to all of humanity include human-to-human quandaries, cruelty, and other troubles that are in addition to natural disasters, disease, and death. Differences in the perception of the nature and status of individual personhood have meant and continue to manifest universal appreciation and disapproval in societies differentially. Confucianism engulfs the ethical convention of societies that have adopted the dogma of ancestor worship and filial piety, including the family as model of polity. Expressed in biological and sociocultural terms, individual differences pervade all of humanity. The nature of humans accounts for biological differences. In contrast, sociocultural attributes of individual differences are culturally based.

Data identity and perspectivism

This paper uses several case studies to suggest that (1) two prominent definitions of data do not on their own capture how scientists use data and (2) a novel perspectival account of data is needed. It then outlines some key features of what this account could look like. Those prominent views, the relational and representational, do not fully capture what data are and how they function in science. The representational view is insensitive to the scientific context in which data are used. The relational account does not fully account for the empirical nature of data and how it is possible for data to be evidentially useful. The perspectival account surmounts these problems by accommodating a representational element to data. At the same time, data depend upon the epistemic context because they are the product of situated and informed judgements.

Conditional Testimony

This chapter shows how reliance on testimony in conditional form can produce violations of the Suppositional Rule, including realistic cases where speakers rationally accept both ‘If A, C’ and ‘If A, not C’ in the same context. Attempts to explain away the phenomena in terms of sensitivity to the epistemic context or failure of conditionals to express propositions fail to do justice to the phenomena. Cases of slightly less than perfect trust in conditional testimony are particularly hard for such views to handle properly. The neglect of the interplay between the primary suppositional heuristic and the secondary testimonial heuristic has led to widespread misinterpretation of Gibbard’s Sly Pete case and similar examples.

Mathematical Models of Consciousness

In recent years, promising mathematical models have been proposed that aim to describe conscious experience and its relation to the physical domain. Whereas the axioms and metaphysical ideas of these theories have been carefully motivated, their mathematical formalism has not. In this article, we aim to remedy this situation. We give an account of what warrants mathematical representation of phenomenal experience, derive a general mathematical framework that takes into account consciousness’ epistemic context, and study which mathematical structures some of the key characteristics of conscious experience imply, showing precisely where mathematical approaches allow to go beyond what the standard methodology can do. The result is a general mathematical framework for models of consciousness that can be employed in the theory-building process.

Contextualism and closure

Skepticism confronts us with a paradox (sometimes known as “the skeptical trilemma”), a version of which follows: (1) I know that I am working on a computer right now; (2) I know that knowing that I am working on a computer right now logically implies that I am not being deceived or manipulated in the way that skeptical hypotheses imagine. (This implication is called “closure under known logical implication”); (3) I do not or cannot know that I am not being deceived or manipulated in the way skeptical hypotheses imagine. The paradox of skepticism is that these three statements are logically incompatible. A relatively new movement in epistemology called contextualism proposes that we can accept all three of the claims in the trilemma, by recognizing that they are not all true within the same epistemic context. Briefly, contextualists claim that we can know in ordinary contexts, but cannot know that we are not being deceived or manipulated in a skeptical scenario, but the latter fact is true in a different epistemic context than the ordinary knowledge that we might have. Closure under known logical implication will remain true, but only insofar as the implications involved are alternatives that belong to the same epistemic context as the original knowledge claim. In this paper, I claim that contextualism’s account of how epistemological contexts change, together with its acceptance of closure, is implausible.

Leuchtende Unordnung, aufscheinende Ordnungen

This essay attempts to characterize the “strict” methodology of Michel Serres (1930–2019), a structuralist philosopher of knowledge, science and culture. On the one hand his works seem to be playful, even literary. On the other hand – and above all, so the author’s thesis – in its consequence they are quite uncompromising: Serres follows a structuralist, if not mathematical, paradigm. Methodically important leitmotifs of Serres’ thinking – for the epistemic context, these are, e. g. the detour, the wandering, the journey, the creation of connections – appear as micrological scenes or (recurring) narrations. They offer small phenomenologies and at the same time explore and expose structures: the interplay between disorder(s) and order(s). In recent years, Serres has become known for his writings on Internet and digitization. But there is also something like Serres’ legal, social, and ecological philosophy – which is well worth looking into.