Sensitive and Insensitive Causation

By James F. Woodward. 2006

How researchers see this paper

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Citations in the corpus

Explanation in Artificial Intelligence: Insights from the Social Sciences (2017, background): “Woodward [191] argues that sufficiency is another strong criteria, in that people prefer causes that bring about the effect without any other cause.”
Causal Responsibility and Counterfactuals (2013, background): “The exact details of the shooting (e.g., its precise timing) do not alter the coarser-grained outcome that the victim died, and this is the critical variable in deciding causal responsibility in this situation (cf. Woodward, 2006; Lewis, 2000).”
Causal superseding. (2015, background): “Woodward (2006) defines a property he calls 'sensitivity' to describe the robustness of a causal relationship.”
The problem of variable choice (2016, background): “If you must add a large number of additional arrows from additional variables Zi into Y to achieve stability (i.e. only the structure with 26 For more on stability, see Woodward (2006, 2010).”
Causal Reasoning and Large Language Models: Opening a New Frontier for Causality (2023, methodology): “We use a variant of robust sufﬁcient causality (Hitchcock, 2012; Woodward, 2006; Hitchcock, 2012): Robust sufﬁcient causality : Given that causal event C occurred, outcome event E would have occurred even if other events that contributed to B’s occurrence had not occurred.”
How, whether, why: Causal judgments as counterfactual contrasts (2015, background): “It has also been argued that sufficiency is an important aspect of causation: we prefer causes that bring about the outcome without requiring any other causes (Woodward, 2006).”
Dissecting explanatory power (2010, background): “Less sensitive explanations are more powerful in that they enable inferences to more counterfactual situations in which omitted variables take non-actual values (Woodward 2006).”
Causal-explanatory pluralism: How intentions, functions, and mechanisms influence causal ascriptions. (2010, background): “The idea that not all dependence relationships are equal echoes discussions from philosophy, particularly in the recent work of Woodward (2006) and Campbell (2008).”
Intuitive Theories (2020, background): “Causal relationships are robust to the extent that they would have continued to hold even if the conditions in this particular situation had been somewhat different (cf. Lewis, 1986; Woodward, 2006).”