Causation in Science

Causation is one of the key concepts employed in the sciences. In our attempt to understand and influence the world around us, one of the main things we need to know is what causes what. Once we understand the causal connections, we are in a position to explain what has gone before, predict what will come in the future, and intervene to produce the outcomes we require. While scientists deal with the concrete details, it is philosophers who consider in the abstract what it is for one thing to cause another. The aim of this project is to bring together that abstract philosophical approach to causation with a more concrete understanding of the work actually undertaken by the practitioners of the sciences.The project is based on a dispositional theory of causation, in which a cause is understood as something that disposes towards an effect. A further key theme for causation comes from that book, namely reductionism versus holism in the sciences. Many philosophers have been attracted to a reductive view of nature in which everything is to be explained ultimately in terms of sub-atomic particles. But is there any evidence for the success of reductionism in the sciences or is the view a mere philosophers’ fancy? It appears, on the contrary, that many sciences are premised on holistic phenomena that cannot be reduced to the sum of their parts: at certain levels of nature, new causal powers emerge that cannot be explained at relatively lower levels. Nature is stratified.The project aims to test the existing dispositional theory of causation against four key sciences in which the issues of causation, emergentism and reduction are central: physics, biology, psychology and the social sciences. While the theory aims to offer new insights that explain practice within these sciences, the theory in return will gain a more empirically informed grounding. National and international experts in these four fields have been recruited as collaborators to the project.