The Logical Form of Interventionism

This paper argues that, notwithstanding the remarkable popularity of Woodward’s (2003) interventionist analysis of causation, the exact definitional details of that theory are surprisingly little understood. There exists a discrepancy in the literature between the insufficient appreciation of the logical details of interventionism, on the one hand, and the amount of theoretical work interventionism is expected to do, on the other. The first part of the paper distinguishes four significantly different readings of the logical form of Woodward’s analysis and identifies the two readings that best capture Woodward’s intentions in (2003) and (2008a), respectively. In the second part, I show that these different readings are not clearly kept apart in the literature, and, moreover, that neither of them can do all the work that interventionists would like the theory to do. I Interventionist theories of causation and methodologies of causal reasoning embedded in that theoretical framework have become increasingly popular in recent years. The by far most thorough and elaborate presentation of a modern variant of interventionism has been given in Woodward (2003). Especially philosophers of the special sciences have received Woodward’s theory with great enthusiasm. 1 This paper argues that, notwithstanding the remarkable popularity of Woodward’s interventionism, the exact definitional details of that theory are surprisingly little understood. Most friends of interventionism apply that theory rather loosely and without a precise understanding of the logical form of its definitional core. To some extent, this lack of clarity about the logical form of interventionism stems from ambiguities in Woodward’s own formulations. As will be shown in the first part o