UC San Diego

The view that there exists a privileged methodological relationship between experimentation and causation is widely held among scientists and philosophers alike. But some philosophers, starting from the intuition that causes ‘make a difference’ to their effects, think that this relationship runs deeper and is also metaphysical and semantic in nature. The question that constitutes the guiding thread running through the papers that make up this dissertation is that of the strength of the connection—metaphysical, semantic and methodological—between causation and experimentation. Just how closely are experimentation and causation related? The view I defend in this dissertation, sometimes explicitly but often implicitly, is that this connection is not nearly as tight as it is often taken to be.