Oxford University Press sent me this book by Phyllis Illari and Frederica Russo, Causality (Philosophical theory meets scientific practice) a little while ago. (The book appeared in 2014.) Unless I asked for it, I cannot remember…
“The problem is whether and how to use information of general causation established in science to ascertain individual responsibility.” (p.38)
As the subtitle indicates, this is a philosophy book, not a statistics book. And not particularly intended for statisticians. Hence, I am not exactly qualified to analyse its contents, and even less to criticise its lack of connection with statistics. But this being a blog post… I read rather slowly through the book, which exposes a wide range (“a map”, p.8) of approaches and perspectives on the notions of causality, some ways to infer about causality, and the point of doing all this, concluding with a relativistic (and thus eminently philosophical) viewpoint defending a “pluralistic mosaic” or a “causal mosaic” that relates to all existing accounts of causality as they “each do something valuable” (p.258). From a naïve bystander perspective, this sounds like a new avatar of deconstructionism applied to causality.
“Simulations can be very illuminating about various phenomena that are complex and have unexpected effects (…) can be run repeatedly to study a system in different situations to those seen for the real system…” (p.15)
This is not to state that the book is uninteresting, as it provides a wide entry into philosophical attempts at categorising and defining causality, if not into the statistical aspects of the issue. (For instance, the problem whether or not causality can be proven uniquely from a statistical perspective is not mentioned.) Among those interesting points in the early chapters, a section (2.5) about simulation. Which however misses the depth of this earlier book on climate simulations I reviewed while in Monash. Or of the discussions at the interdisciplinary seminar last year in Hanover. I.J. Good’s probabilistic causality is mentioned but hardly detailed. (With the warning remark that one “should not confuse predictability with determinism [and] determinism with causality”, p.82.) Continue reading →
There will be a seminar talk by Mehdi Molkaraie (Pompeu Fabra) next week at Institut Henri Poincaré (IHP), Paris, on his paper with Vincent Gomez.
