Causal Selection and the Pathway Concept

By Lauren N. Ross. Philosophia Scientiæ, 2018

49 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Most philosophical work on causal selection examines the selection of single causes and aims to clarify what grounds, if any, justify this selection. Such analyses overlook the fact that in scientific contexts multiple factors are often selected as the important causes of some outcome. This analysis examines a multicausal case in which factors in causal pathways are selected in biological explanations. This work provides a novel analysis of the pathway concept, its role in causal selection, and the rationale behind this selection. It is argued that this rationale is guided by principled considerations, which have been overlooked in the extant literature.

Subfields: History and Philosophy of Science, Molecular Biology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1af32376201c122ece9f1f3d06956c1274485791