On causal claims, contingencies, and inference:How causal terminology affects what we think about the strength of causal links
Abstract
The communicative goal behind a causal claim like “Smok-ing causes heart attacks” is to inform recipients about the ex-istence of a causal link between the factors mentioned in theproposition. Different terminologies can be used to accomplishthis goal. Sometimes people use formulations of the form “Ccauses E”, like in the tobacco warning above, and sometimesthey use other formulations, such as modal propositions like“C can cause / lead to E.”, or statements like “C increases therisk of E.”. We investigate the hypothesis that different causalstructure claims, by means of different terminologies, not onlycommunicate the existence of a causal link but also implic-itly elicit intuitions about that link’s strength. Experiment 1revealed that claims like “C causes E” imply a stronger linkthan, for example, modal formulations like “C can cause E”.Experiment 2 tested implications of this finding for researchon causal structure learning.