---
title: Interventionist Theory of Causation (Woodward)
type: concept
tags: [philosophy-of-science, causation, interventionism, woodward, manipulation]
sources: ["[[sources/2023-anjum-rocca-phi403-causation-in-science]]", "[[sources/2023-anjum-rocca-phi403-lecture-08-have-your-cause-and-beat-it]]"]
created: 2026-04-20
updated: 2026-04-20
---

# 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 [[concepts/philosophical-bias|operationalisation fallacy]] (identifying a phenomenon with the operation used to detect it).

## Relation to BPM
The whole [[concepts/prescriptive-process-monitoring|prescriptive-monitoring]] / [[concepts/agentic-bpm|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]].

## Related
[[concepts/causation]] · [[concepts/regularity-theory-of-causation]] · [[concepts/dispositionalism]] · [[concepts/rct-limitations]] · [[concepts/causal-process-discovery]]