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LIT-713: Causation and Manipulability

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StatusActive — read 2026-10-05 (NOTE-585): in full, from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's own open page (2023 revision). Worth reading as Woodward's compact statement of the interventionist account: X causes Y when an intervention on X, a surgical exogenous change defined by conditions M1–M4, would change Y. It answers the circularity and anthropocentrism objections and separates total, direct and contributing causes. Limits: it is a survey, and this version does not treat invariance, proportionality or levels of causation; for those the book (LIT-723, unread) is needed.
Tagsmetaphysics, causality, philosophy-of-science
Cited as “paper” byNOTE-585 — Causation and Manipulability
Cited as “source” byTHEORY-138 — X is a cause of Y exactly when some intervention on X with respect to Y would change Y, where an intervention is an exogenous causal process that alone sets X (M1), affects Y only through X (M2), is not caused by anything that affects Y by another route (M3), and leaves Y's causes off the path through X unchanged (M4); so defined, causation is not reduced to non-causal facts but is not viciously circular, and needs no human agent

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James Woodward, “Causation and Manipulability”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (first published 17 August 2001; substantive revision 6 May 2023), ISSN 1095-5054

Key takeaways

  • Causes are handles (§1). If C causes E, manipulating C in the right way should be a way of changing E.
  • Agency theories fail (§3). A correlation that persists when A is brought about by a free act need not be causal: the placebo case.
  • An intervention is surgical (§§4–5). Woodward’s conditions M1–M4, relative to a target Y: the intervention I is the only cause of X; I does not cause Y by a route avoiding X; I is not caused by anything that affects Y by such a route; I leaves Y’s other causes, off the path from I through X, unchanged.
  • Interventionist counterfactuals (§5). Whether X causes Y is what Y would do under an intervention on X. Setting X differs from observing it.
  • Non-reductive, not viciously circular (§§5–6). An intervention is a causal notion, so there is no reduction, but defining X’s causing Y does not presuppose causal facts about X and Y themselves.
  • No human needed (§8). A natural process with the right causal history counts as an intervention: a natural experiment.
  • Variables (§12). A cause must be representable as a variable whose values the same system can take. Where no well-defined intervention exists, as with “being a raven”, there is no bona fide cause on this account.

Standing in the record

Filed on 2026-10-05 at the owner’s request, as a supplement to the essay on organizational will. It supplies the account of causation that List and Menzies (LIT-722) build on. For §5.3 it gives the general form of a test for an organization-level cause: an intervention on the organizational variable that changes the outcome while meeting M1–M4. The entry does not apply it to organizations. The account is THEORY-138. The book (LIT-723) is unread.

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