Causal theory error in college students’ understanding of science studies

When reasoning about science studies, people often make causal theory errors by inferring or accepting a causal claim based on correlational evidence. While humans naturally think in terms of causal relationships, reasoning about science findings requires understanding how evidence supports—or fails to support—a causal claim. This study investigated college students’ thinking about causal claims presented in brief media reports describing behavioral science findings. How do science students reason about causal claims from correlational evidence? And can their reasoning be improved through instruction clarifying the nature of causal theory error? We examined these questions through a series of written reasoning exercises given to advanced college students over three weeks within a psychology methods course. In a pretest session, students critiqued study quality and support for a causal claim from a brief media report suggesting an association between two variables. Then, they created diagrams depicting possible alternative causal theories. At the beginning of the second session, an instructional intervention introduced students to an extended example of a causal theory error through guided questions about possible alternative causes. Then, they completed the same two tasks with new science reports immediately and again 1 week later. The results show students’ reasoning included fewer causal theory errors after the intervention, and this improvement was maintained a week later. Our findings suggest that interventions aimed at addressing reasoning about causal claims in correlational studies are needed even for advanced science students, and that training on considering alternative causal theories may be successful in reducing casual theory error.

Kuhn, Putnam and the Reference

In some of his writings, Kuhn criticized Putnam’s causal theory of reference for natural kind terms put forward in his classic paper “The Meaning of ‘Meaning’” claiming that Putnam’s theory cannot explain the reference changes of natural kind terms. After looking into Kuhn’s objections to Putnam’s reference theory, some of the main features of Kuhn’s incommensurability thesis and some traits of Putnam’s later version of his theory, we will argue, on the one hand, that Putnam’s later reference theory contains some components that enhance the explanation of the reference change of natural kind terms, and on the other hand, that Kuhn’s and Putnam’s views on reference do no differ that much, especially in virtue ofcertain similarities between Kuhn’s incommensurability thesis and Putnam’s thesis of conceptual relativity.

Two Accounts of the Problem of Enhanced Control

According to event-causal libertarianism, an action is free in the sense relevant to moral responsibility when it is caused indeterministically by an agent’s beliefs, desires, intentions, or by their occurrences. This paper attempts to clarify one of the major objections to this theory: the objection that the theory cannot explain the relevance of indeterminism to this kind of freedom (known as free will). Christopher Evan Franklin (2011, 2018) has argued that the problem of explaining the relevance of indeterminism to free will (which he calls “the problem of enhanced control”) arises because it is difficult to see how indeterminism could enhance our abilities, and disappears when we realize that beside the relevant abilities free will requires opportunities. In this paper, I argue that the problem occurs not because of the focus on abilities, but because of the difficulty to explain how indeterminism could contribute to the satisfaction of the sourcehood condition of free will in the framework of event-causal theory of action.

Términos teóricos y teorías híbridas de la referencia

Both descriptivism and the causal theory of reference fail to account for the meaning of theoretical terms in a way consistent with scientific realism. Faced with this problem, hybrid theories of reference have been developed. They combine features of both descriptivism and the causal theory and seek to capture the advantages of each. In this work, we critically analyze two strategies to articulate hybrid theories of reference in the face of the problem of the meaning of theoretical terms. They are exemplified by the proposals of Psillos and Kitcher. We argue that neither of these strategies is successful in articulating the descriptive and causal elements in a genuine hybrid theory of reference that satisfies the standards of scientific realism.

Memory Disjunctivism: a Causal Theory

Relationalists about episodic memory must endorse a disjunctivist theory of memory-experience according to which cases of genuine memory and cases of total confabulation involve distinct kinds of mental event with different natures. This paper is concerned with a pair of arguments against this view, which are analogues of the ‘causal argument’ and the ‘screening off argument’ that have been pressed in recent literature against relationalist (and hence disjunctivist) theories of perception. The central claim to be advanced is that to deal with these two arguments, memory disjunctivists both can and should draw on resources that are standardly appealed to by rival common factor theories of episodic memory, and, in particular, to the idea that genuine memories and merely apparent ones are to be distinguished, at least in part, in terms of the distinctive ways in which they are caused. On the proposed view, there are substantive causal constraints associated both with cases of genuine memory and with cases of mere confabulation. The resulting theory thus tells us something important about the nature both of genuine memories and of mere confabulations, namely, that such experiences must be caused in certain distinctive ways and cannot occur except as the result of a distinctive sort of causal process. In addition, the theory enables the disjunctivist to offer a unified response to an important pair of arguments against her view.

Pluralistic Attitude-Explanation and the Mechanisms of Intentional Action

According to the Causal Theory of Action (CTA), genuine actions are individuated by their causal history. Actions are bodily movements that are causally explained by citing the agent’s reasons. Reasons are then explained as some combination of propositional attitudes—beliefs, desires, and/or intentions. The CTA is thus committed to realism about the attitudes. This chapter explores current models of decision-making from the mind sciences, and argues that it is far from obvious how to locate the propositional attitudes in the causal processes they describe. The outcome of the analysis is a proposal for pluralism: there are several ways one could attempt to map states like ‘intention’ onto decision-making processes, but none will fulfill all of the roles attributed to the attitudes by the CTA.

Understanding the complexity of population health interventions: assessing intervention system theory (ISyT)

Given their inherent complexity, we need a better understanding of what is happening inside the “black box” of population health interventions. The theory-driven intervention/evaluation paradigm is one approach to addressing this question. However, barriers related to semantic or practical issues stand in the way of its complete integration into evaluation designs. In this paper, we attempt to clarify how various theories, models and frameworks can contribute to developing a context-dependent theory, helping us to understand the black box of population health interventions and to acknowledge their complexity. To achieve this goal, we clarify what could be referred to as “theory” in the theory-driven evaluation of the interventional system, distinguishing it from other models, frameworks and classical theories. In order to evaluate the interventional system with a theory-driven paradigm, we put forward the concept of interventional system theory (ISyT), which combines a causal theory and an action model. We suggest that an ISyT could guide evaluation processes, whatever evaluation design is applied, and illustrate this alternative method through different examples of studies. We believe that such a clarification can help to promote the use of theories in complex intervention evaluations, and to identify ways of considering the transferability and scalability of interventions.