Phyllis Illari is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Kent. She has also held posts at the Universities of Stirling and Bristol. She is interested in all aspects of the metaphysics and methodology of causality. She is currently working on a Leverhulme-Trust funded project on mechanisms and causality across the sciences that uses understanding of the discovery and use of causal mechanisms in different sciences to inform philosophical work on causality.

Federica Russo is currently Research Associate at the University of Kent and has visited the Centre for Philosophy of Natural and Social Science (CPNSS) at the LSE from April 2004 to January 2005 and the Center for Philosophy of Science (Pittsburgh) from January to April 2009. She is interested in causality and probability in the social, biomedical and policy sciences, as well as in the philosophical, legal, and social, implications of technology. Federica is part of the editorial board of the journal Philosophy and Technology and features editor of the monthly gazette The Reasoner.

Jon Williamson is Professor of Reasoning, Inference and Scientific Method in the philosophy department at the University of Kent. He works on causality, probability, logic and applications of formal reasoning within science, mathematics and artificial intelligence. Jon currently heads the philosophy department and is a director of the multi-disciplinary University of Kent Centre for Reasoning. He runs the Reasoning Club, a network of research centres, and edits The Reasoner, a monthly gazette on research in this area. Jon was Times Higher Education UK Young Researcher of the Year 2007.

• PART I - Introduction


• 1: Phyllis McKay Illari, Federica Russo, Jon Williamson: Why look at Causality in the Sciences?


• PART II - Health Sciences


• 2: R. Paul Thompson: Causality, Theories, and Medicine


• 3: Alex Broadbent: Inferring Causation in Epidemiology: Mechanisms, Black Boxes, and Contrasts


• 4: Harold Kinkaid: Causal Modeling, Mechanism, and Probability in Epidemiology


• 5: Bert Leuridan, Erik Weber: The IARC and Mechanistic Evidence


• 6: Donald Gillies: The Russo-Williamson Thesis and the Question of whether Smoking Causes Heart Disease


• PART III - Psychology


• 7: David Lagnado: Causal Thinking


• 8: Benjamin Rottman, Woo-kyoung Ahn, Christian Luhmann: When and How Do People Reason about Unobserved Causes?


• 9: Clare R Walsh, Steven A Sloman: Counterfactual and Generative Accounts of Causal Attribution


• 10: Ken Aizawa, Carl Gillet: The Autonomy of Psychology in the Age of Neuroscience


• 11: Otto Lappi, Anna-Mari Rusanen: Turing Machines and Causal Mechanisms in Cognitive Science


• 12: Keith A. Markus: Real Causes and Ideal Manipulations: Pearl's Theory of Causal Inference from the Point of View of Psychological Research Methods


• PART IV - Social Sciences


• 13: Daniel Little: Causal Mechanisms in the Social Realm


• 14: Ruth Groff: Getting Past Hume in the Philosophy of Social Science


• 15: Michel Mouchart, Federica Russo: Causal Explanation: Recursive Decompositions and Mechanisms


• 16: Kevin D. Hoover: Counterfactuals and Causal Structure


• 17: Damien Fennell: The Error Term and its Interpretation in Structural Models in Econometrics


• 18: Hossein Hassani, Anatoly Zhigljavsky, Kerry Patterson, Abdol S. Soofi: A Comprehensive Causality Test Based on the Singular Spectrum Analysis


• PART V - Natural Sciences


• 19: Tudor M. Baetu: Mechanism Schemas and the Relationship Between Biological Theories


• 20: Roberta L. Millstein: Chances and Causes in Evolutionary Biology: How Many Chances Become One Chance


• 21: Sahotra Sarkar: Drift and the Causes of Evolution


• 22: Garrett Pendergraft: In Defense of a Causal Requirement on Explanation


• 23: Paolo Vineis, Aneire Khan, Flavio D'Abramo: Epistemological Issues Raised by Research on Climate Change


• 24: Giovanni Boniolo, Rossella Faraldo, Antonio Saggion: Explicating the Notion of 'Causation': the Role of the Extensive Quantities


• 25: Miklos Redei, Balazs Gyenis: Causal Completeness of Probability Theories-results and Open Problems


• PART VI - Computer Science, Probability, and Statistics


• 26: Isabelle Guyon, C. Aliferis, G. Cooper, A. Elisseeff J.-P. Pellet, P. Spirtes, A. Statnikov: Causality Workbench


• 27: Jan Lemeire, Kris Steenhaut, Abdellah Touhafi: When are Graphical Models not Good Models


• 28: Dawn E. Holmes: Why Making Bayesian Networks Objectively Bayesian Make Sense


• 29: Branden Fitelson, Christopher Hitchcock: Probabilistic Measures of Causal Strength


• 30: Kevin B Korb, Erik P. Nyberg, Lucas Hope: A New Causal Power Theory


• 31: Samantha Kleinberg, Bud Mishra: Multiple Testing of Causal Hypotheses


• 32: Ricardo Silva: Measuring Latent Causal Structure


• 33: Judea Pearl: The Structural Theory of Causation


• 34: Sara Geneletti, A. Philip Dawid: Defining and Identifying the Effect of Treatment on the Treated


• 35: Nancy Cartwright: Predicting 'It Will Work for Us': (Way) Beyond Statistics


• PART VII - Causality and Mechanisms


• 36: Stathis Psillos: The Idea of Mechanism


• 37: Stuart Glennan: Singular and General Causal Relations: A Mechanist Perspective


• 38: Phyllis McKay Illari, Jon Williamson: Mechanisms are Real and Local


• 39: Jim Bogen, Peter Machamer: Mechanistic Information and Causal Continuity


• 40: Phil Dowe: The Causal-Process-Model Theory of Mechanisms


• 41: M. Kuhlmann: Mechanisms in Dynamically Complex Systems


• 42: Julian Reiss: Third Time's a Charm: Causation, Science, and Wittgensteinian Pluralism


• Index