Interventionist Explanations

Abstract

AbstractThe present chapter addresses another account to causal explanation, centred on the idea of intervention. Intersecting the “manipulationist” approach to causation, in roughly the last three decades Jim Woodward has put forward the “interventionist-counterfactual” theory of explanation (and causation). In Sect. 7.1 I will introduce his view, stressing its core features, purposes, and some possible shortcomings. Section 7.2 will consider the attempts to apply it, more specifically, to the health sciences, pointing out some of the advantages it has been held to have in this field, and, on the contrary, some open issues. The last Sect. 7.3 will have a double aim. First, I will recall another manipulationist view of causation, the agency theory by Donald Gillies, which is directly intended to do justice to causation in the health sciences. Secondly, I will consider some recent work by Woodward which tries to set some distance between his counterfactualist account and causal explanation. Overall, the chapter is meant to present and critically discuss the adequacy of a manipulationist-interventionist approach to causal explanation with respect to medical cases.