Interventionist Theory of Causation

Associated with James Woodward: C causes E just in case an ideal intervention on C would change E. Causes are manipulable handles on the world; causation is cashed out in terms of what would happen under hypothetical interventions, not under passive observation.

Core ideas covered in PHI403

Intervention, manipulation, prevention are what make causation practically relevant — the reason "we fund scientific research" (sources/2023-anjum-rocca-phi403-lecture-02-do-we-need-causation).
Subtractive vs additive interference — we can remove a causal factor (quit smoking) or add a counteracting factor (air-conditioner against the sun) (sources/2023-anjum-rocca-phi403-lecture-08-have-your-cause-and-beat-it).
Antipathetic interference — two causes in conjunction can reverse the direction of their separate effects (clonidine + beta-blockers example).
Experimental methods (lab science, RCTs, GMO construction) are naturally motivated by interventionism.

Tensions the course flags

Additive interference breaks the constant conjunction / regularity view — we can have the cause without the effect simply by adding an interferer.
Interventionism struggles with non-manipulable causes (the Sun, the Big Bang) — yet these are paradigm scientific objects.
It's an epistemological theory masquerading as an ontological one: it defines causation by what we can do, which risks operationalisation fallacy (identifying a phenomenon with the operation used to detect it).

Relation to BPM

The whole prescriptive-monitoring / APM program is interventionist in spirit: an agent treats each decision point as a handle it can manipulate to change case outcomes. See concepts/causal-process-discovery, concepts/intervention-policy, sources/2022-kubrak-prescriptive-ppm-slr (which explicitly names causal policy design as the most promising research direction), and sources/2021-dumas-process-mining-2-from-insights-to-action.

concepts/causation · concepts/regularity-theory-of-causation · concepts/dispositionalism · concepts/rct-limitations · concepts/causal-process-discovery