An Interventionist Approach to Causation in Psychology
John Campbell · 2007
Abstract Interventionist analyses make explicit the conception of causation used in experimental science, but have not been applied to the case of mental causation. This chapter addresses some of the basic problems of mental causation in interventionist terms. It proposes a way of finding the “right level” of variables to use in characterizing the causal workings of a system, whether we should be describing causal relations in psychological rather than biological terms. It argues that a notion of “soft” intervention is needed when discussing causation by reasons. Finally, we can make sense of the idea of causation without mechanisms, and we may have to do that when we are considering the outcomes of combinations of psychological and biological variables.