Causation

Hub concept for the Philosophy of Science cluster. "Causation" names whatever it is for A to cause B — a question that is ontological (what causation is) and distinct from the epistemological question of how we come to know of causes (sources/2023-anjum-rocca-phi403-lecture-03-evidence-based-on-what).

Science is pervaded by causal claims — "increase", "prevent", "affect", "reduce", "enhance" — and applied science presupposes causation: there is no intervention without causal impact, no observation without a causal chain from object to sense, no policy recommendation without a causal theory (sources/2023-anjum-rocca-phi403-lecture-02-do-we-need-causation).

Rival theories (the PHI403 tour)

The course introduces the main competing theories of causation as a family of positions, each of which motivates a different scientific method:

Theory	Key idea	Motivates
concepts/regularity-theory-of-causation (Hume)	Causation = constant conjunction / correlation	Statistical / correlational studies
Difference-making (Lewis, counterfactual)	C causes E if E would not have occurred without C	Comparative / RCT studies
concepts/interventionist-theory-of-causation (Woodward)	Causes are manipulable handles	Experimental methods
concepts/dispositionalism (Anjum, Mumford, Cartwright)	Properties have tendencies/powers	Mechanistic / singular case studies
[[concepts/mechanisms-in-science	Mechanism theories]]	Causation = underlying productive mechanism
concepts/probabilistic-causation (Suppes, Mellor)	C raises the probability of E	Bayesian / frequentist statistics

Key distinctions used throughout the course

Ontology vs epistemology — what causation is vs how we discover it; collapsing them is a frequent error (sources/2023-anjum-rocca-phi403-lecture-03-evidence-based-on-what).
Monism vs pluralism — one theory of causation vs many. The course defends ontological monism + methodological pluralism (concepts/causal-pluralism).
Universal vs singular — Humean covering-law causation vs dispositionalist single-case causation (sources/2023-anjum-rocca-phi403-lecture-11-is-more-data-better).
Determinism vs indeterminism vs dispositional tendency — three modalities of the cause–effect link (sources/2023-anjum-rocca-phi403-lecture-09-from-regularities-to-tendencies, sources/2023-anjum-rocca-phi403-lecture-14-big-bang).
Transitivity — not every causal chain is transitive (sprinkler/fire case, sources/2023-anjum-rocca-phi403-lecture-14-big-bang).

Why this matters for BPM

Causal claims appear wherever we move from predicting processes to intervening in them. Prescriptive process monitoring, agentic enactment, and self-modifying ABPSs all make causal claims ("if the agent reroutes the case, the SLA will be met"), so they inherit every philosophical bias of their chosen theory of causation. See concepts/causal-process-discovery for the process-mining-specific version and concepts/rct-limitations for the evidence-hierarchy critique relevant to PPM evaluation.

concepts/causal-pluralism · concepts/dispositionalism · concepts/mechanisms-in-science · concepts/probabilistic-causation · concepts/philosophical-bias · concepts/causal-process-discovery