How many schools of causality are there? More than you think
burny_tech · x · 2026-11-10
burnytech notes that diving into causality reveals more nuance, disagreement, and uncertainty than expected — not clarity.
The attached overview maps:
- Seven main theories of causation: regularity (Hume/Mill/Mackie), probabilistic (Reichenbach/Suppes), counterfactual (Lewis), interventionism (Woodward, close to Pearl), physical process/transmission (Salmon/Dowe), mechanistic approaches, and causal powers/dispositionalism — each with its central idea and key difficulty
- Three visible rivalries in practice: Pearl's structural causal models vs Neyman–Rubin potential outcomes (largely compatible under matching assumptions); counterfactual foundations vs Dawid's decision-theoretic approach; Granger predictive causality vs interventional and dynamical causal modeling
- Whether absences (not watering a plant) are genuine causes remains a real disagreement; whether causation is fundamental in physics is still disputed
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