Hi Everyone!
I am incredibly excited to announce this week's speaker: Professor Ned Hall from the
Harvard Department of Philosophy. The working title of Professor Hall's talk is
"In Praise of Causal Mechanisms." As per usual, the talk will be held in CGIS
K354 on Wednesday (3/5) at 12 noon and lunch will be served.
You might be asking yourself: "Why has Tess invited a philosopher to Applied
Stats?" Well, as Kurt Lewin, (sometimes considered the father of modern social
psychology) once said: "There is nothing so practical as a good theory." When I
need some practical theory about causality, I turn to Professor Hall's work --
especially Structural equations and
causation<http://link.springer.com.ezp-prod1.hul.harvard.edu/article/10.…-9>,
and his recently released edited volume, Causation and
Counterfactuals<http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/causation-and-counterfactu…ls>.
Here's Professor Hall's abstract:
Consider two theses about causation: (1) Causes are connected to their effects by way of
mediating causal mechanisms or processes. (2) Scientific inquiry aims (at least in part)
at discerning and describing the causal structure of our world. Some of the best
contemporary work on causation claims—often implicitly, but sometimes quite
explicitly—that, in giving an account of causation, we should sacrifice (1) for the sake
of producing an account that makes the best sense of (2). I will first try to show why
this claim is quite attractive, and then obstreperously argue against it: I will aim to
show that the best way to make sense of (2) is, in fact, by means of an account of causal
structure that fully vindicates (1).
Looking forward to seeing you all on Wednesday,
Tess
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Tess Wise
PhD Candidate
Harvard Department of Government
http://tesswise.com