The Nature and Function of Causal Thinking, Fall 2005; California Institute of Technology

California Institute Of Technology, Pasadena CA

Investigators

Abstract

Funding is requested for a workshop on "The Origins and Functions of Causal Thinking "to be held at the California Institute of Technology in Fall, 2005. This workshop will be the second in a series of international workshops on the topic, and will focus on the connection between causation, agency, and intervention. Intellectual Merit. The workshop will bring together an international body of scholars from different disciplines, including philosophy, cognitive psychology,developmental psychology, primatology, and artificial intelligence to explore issues having to do with the structure, functions and origins of causal concepts and reasoning. The rationale for the workshop is that there are rapidly growing bodies of research in all of these disciplines that address common themes, but which have proceeded in isolation from one another. Researchers in all of these areas would benefit from more cross -disciplinary fertilization. Within philosophy, interventionist or agency oriented approaches show promise as accounts of causation as this notion figures in everyday life and in the social and biomedical sciences, but it is also unclear to what extent such approaches can be extended to cover causal notions as they figure in fundamental physics, and what follows for our understanding of the notion of causation and its place in human life if they cannot. Empirical studies of causal learning in children, adults and non-human primates suggest that the human ability to learn from interventions, as well as our ability to combine such with information obtained from passive observation, is central to human causal cognition and to what distinguishes this from the abilities of non-human animals. For all of these reasons a conference devoted to the exploration of issues related to the connections between causation, agency and intervention will have a very large intellectual pay-off and should help to shape future work in this interdisciplinary field in important ways. Broader Impact. Many of the participants in the workshop will be women. The workshop will be open to all interested researchers and the results will be made available to a wider public in the form of an edited volume entitled, The Origins and Functions of Causal Thinking. More generally, a better understanding of the nature of causal reasoning in humans, of the purposes to which causal reasoning is put, and of the nature of causation itself, may ultimately help to enhance people's ability to engage in causal reasoning. Current evidence suggests that people are in fact very good at learning about causal relationships among phenomena that they can directly observe or control. At the same time people are often very bad judges of causal relationships when presented with information in a more abstract form (such as of statistical data). A better understanding o fhow people reason about causation might be used to improve educational practice in disciplines (including any area of science) that focus on the provision of specific kinds of causal understanding. Moreover, citizens in a participatory democracy are often required to pass judgment on competing policy proposals. Doing so requires an understanding of the way in which the implementation of a new policy constitutes an intervention in existing causal structures, and of what the effects of such a disruption will be. An enhanced understanding of causal reasoning may enable us to better educate citizens on policy issues and enable them to make decisions that are better informed.