Causal Judgment: What Can Philosophy Learn from Experiment? What Can it Contribute to Experiment?

Abstract

This paper explores some issues having to do with the implications of empirical studies of causal cognition and how these relate to philosophical work on causation that is more normative in aspiration. Among the issues discussed are the role of appeals to “intuition”, similarities and differences between empirical investigations of causal cognition conducted by psychologists and investigations by experimental philosophers, the relationship between descriptive and normative accounts of causal reasoning and the role of invariance-based considerations in causal cognition. I explore how descriptive empirical work on causal cognition and philosophical accounts of causation can mutually inform each other.