PhilSci Archive

Causation, Responsibility, and Typicality

Sytsma, Justin (2020) Causation, Responsibility, and Typicality. [Preprint]

WarningThere is a more recent version of this item available.
[img]
Preview
Text
__Causation, Responsibility, and Typicality__PREPRINT.pdf

Download (491kB) | Preview

Abstract

There is ample evidence that violations of injunctive norms impact ordinary causal attributions. This has struck some as deeply surprising, taking the ordinary concept of causation to be purely descriptive. Our explanation of the findings—the responsibility view—rejects this: we contend that the concept is in fact normative, being akin to concepts like responsibility and accountability. Based on this account, we predicted a very different pattern of results for causal attributions when an agent violates a statistical norm. And this pattern has been borne out by the data (Sytsma et al. 2012, Livengood et al. 2017, Sytsma under review a). These predictions were based on the responsibility attributions that we would make. In this paper, I extend these previous findings, testing responsibility attributions. The results confirm the basis of our predictions, showing the same pattern of effects previously found for causal attributions for both injunctive norms and statistical norms. In fact, the results for responsibility attributions are not statistically significantly different from those previously found for causal attributions. I argue that this close correspondence lends further credence to the responsibility view over competing explanations of the impact of norms on causal attributions.


Export/Citation: EndNote | BibTeX | Dublin Core | ASCII/Text Citation (Chicago) | HTML Citation | OpenURL
Social Networking:
Share |

Item Type: Preprint
Creators:
CreatorsEmailORCID
Sytsma, Justin
Keywords: Causation, Causal Attributions, Responsibility Attributions, Counterfactuals
Subjects: General Issues > Causation
Specific Sciences > Cognitive Science
Depositing User: Justin Sytsma
Date Deposited: 06 Jan 2020 05:49
Last Modified: 06 Jan 2020 05:49
Item ID: 16791
Subjects: General Issues > Causation
Specific Sciences > Cognitive Science
Date: 6 January 2020
URI: https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/id/eprint/16791

Available Versions of this Item

Monthly Views for the past 3 years

Monthly Downloads for the past 3 years

Plum Analytics

Actions (login required)

View Item View Item