Abstract Causation with a Human Face integrates normative work about causal reasoning coming out of philosophy, computer science, and other disciplines—work that specifies how people ought to reason causally—with descriptive research from psychology concerning how people in fact reason about causal relationships. It argues that each line of inquiry can beneficially inform the other. Normative ideas can suggest interesting experiments, and descriptive results can suggest normative ideas that are worthy of exploration. Among the normative ideas discussed are proposals about the role of invariant or stable relationships in successful causal reasoning and the notion of proportionality, which has to do with the extent to which causes and effects are specified at the appropriate “grain.” These normative ideas are reflected in the causal judgments that people actually make as a descriptive matter. The overall framework makes use of an interventionist treatment of causation, but many of the normative ideas and much of the empirical research explored will be of interest independently of this framework. The book also discusses the common philosophical practice of appealing to “intuitions” or “judgments about cases” in support of philosophical theses. Properly understood, these are not different in principle from results from psychological studies of causal cognition and hence can serve as a useful source of information. However, there are a number of important questions about both the normative and descriptive sides of causal cognition that cannot be successfully addressed by an intuition-based methodology, so that philosophers need to move beyond reliance on this.
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