Causality seminars in Louvain and Brussels 11-12 April

2008年03月30日 02:22

Abstract
Answering ‘What if?’-questions is no doubt of central importance for
policy and planning because we need to evaluate what would happen were
each of the actions under consideration implemented. There is a
considerable literature in philosophy on the semantics of counterfactuals
and recently contributions in economics itself. In this paper we argue
that the bulk of this literature puts the problem back to front. It
attempts to use counterfactuals to evaluate causal claims; we argue
instead that one must use causal claims to assess counterfactuals. That
is, we argue that causal knowledge is requiredto evaluate policy
counterfactuals. A related but independent claim is that those
counterfactuals invoked to stand in for causal concepts are a poor tool
for answering the ‘What if?’ questions policy makers are concerned with.
The paper discusses accounts developed by Judea Pearl, Stephen LeRoy and
James Heckman.

Guillaume WUNSCH,
Institut de recherches économiques,
UCL - Belgium

” Potential Outcomes, Counterfactuals, and Structural Modelling”
joint work with M. Mouchart and F. Russo

Friday, APRIL 11, 2008, 16h00, Institute of Statistics, University of
Louvain-la-Neuve, Room : C 115 (STAT)

Abstract
This paper examines the potential outcome model developed by Rubin, and
its counterfactual underpinnings as developed by Lewis. Though a major
contribution of Rubins potential outcome model has been to stress the
importance of the design stage, were call the main methodological and
epistemological flaws of his approach. We argue that the study of causes
and effects does not necessarily require counterfactuals, once a
structural modelling framework, as the one developed here, is adopted. Our
approach emphasises and spells out the role of background knowledge,
marginal-conditional decomposition, and of stability for providing a
causal explanation of a given phenomenon.

Julian Reiss (Erasmus University, Rotterdam)
“Causation in the Social Sciences: An Evidentialist Perspective”
Saturday 12 April, 11h.
Auditorium Bordet Écuries royales, Palais des Académies, Bruxelles

Abstract
Evidence for causal claims comes in a variety of forms in the social
sciences. The most important of these are evidence of what would have
been, evidence of regularities, evidence of certain statistical relations,
evidence of connecting mechanisms and evidence of invariant relationships.
Social scientists often use evidence from more than one source in order to
confirm a single causal hypothesis and sometimes even demand a plurality
of evidence in order for a causal hypothesis to be regarded as
established.
The overall aim of this paper is to provide an analysis of this state of
affairs and draw some methodological conclusions. A number of philosophers
have recently offered pluralistic perspectives on causation. Here I
distinguish epistemic, conceptual and metaphysical versions of pluralism
and consider some of the arguments in favour of these. Ignoring
metaphysical issues here, I end up with a form of evidential monism but
conceptual pluralism about causation in the social sciences.