Overview
This week we'll study more carefully about interventionism and its empirical support. Please address the following questions:
- Woodward believes that most ERC results support the interventionist theory of causation, in the sense that the way people use causation in their learning and inference follows counterfactual thinking (counterfactuals here are understood as interventional/non-backtracking counterfactual). Do you agree with him? Give some specific reasons (or use some specific experiments) to say why or why not. You may pick one particular experiment for your discussion.
- What do primates lack but human beings have in their causal learning capacities, at least according to Woodward? Do you agree?