Process and dependency are better together: A reply to Quillien et al. (2025)

Thanawala and Erb (2024) found that causal judgments in double prevention scenarios are sensitive to the temporal order of events leading up to an outcome, even when the outcome remains constant across the scenarios. These findings challenged the causal pluralism account proposed by Lombrozo (2010) but ultimately supported its core insight: namely, that reasoners think about causal scenarios in terms of both process and dependency. Quillien et al. (2025) provided a compelling re-analysis of Thanawala and Erb's data, arguing that more sophisticated counterfactual accounts of causal reasoning (a type of dependency theory) can account for temporal order effects without appealing to causal pluralism. Here, we question whether continuing to frame the literature in terms of an opposition between process and dependency theories is the most productive path forward. We contend that investigations of causal reasoning would benefit from (1) occasionally emphasizing rich empirical exploration over strict theory comparison and (2) developing integrative accounts to capture how factors typically associated with either process or dependency theories jointly support causal reasoning.