James Woodward - Causation with a Human Face: Normative Theory and Descriptive Psychology

Causation with a Human Face

General Editor:

P. Kyle Stanford, University of California, Irvine

Founding Editor:

Paul Humphreys, University of Virginia

Advisory Board

Anouk Barberousse (European Editor)

Robert W. Batterman

Jeremy Butterfield

Peter Galison

Philip Kitcher

James Woodward

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Causation with a Human Face: Normative Theory and Descriptive Psychology

James Woodward

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ISBN 978-0-19-758541-2

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DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197585412.001.0001

For my dear wife Julia and my brave daughter Katherine

I have been interested in the empirical psychology of causal cognition for decades, but the topic really began to come into focus for me when I participated in a series of workshops at the Stanford Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) in 20034. These were funded by the McDonnell Foundation, with Alison Gopnik as the principal investigator under the title Causal Learning: Computational Learning Mechanisms and Cognitive Development. The workshops brought together philosophers, psychologists, statisticians, and others with a common interest in using computational theories of causal learning to illuminate its empirical psychology. From my point of view, they were paradigms of successful interdisciplinary interaction.