Julian Reiss, “Causation, Evidence and Inference” (Routledge, 2015)
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What is the overall focus of Julian Reiss’s book on causation, evidence, and inference?
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Hello, and welcome to New Books and Philosophy, a podcast channel with the New Books Network. I'm Carrie Figdor, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Iowa, and I'm co-host of the channel, along with Robert Talese, Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University. Together, we bring you conversations with philosophers about their new books, drawing from a wide range of areas of contemporary philosophical inquiry. Today's interview is with Julian Reese, who is professor of philosophy at Durham University. His new book, Causation, Evidence, and Inference, is just out from Routledge. What do we mean when we claim that something is a cause of something else, that smoking causes cancer, that the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand caused World War I, that the eight ball caused the other billiard ball to go into the side pocket?
In his new book, Ries defends an inferentialist account in which causal claims are inferred from evidence for a hypothesis and are the basis of inferences to other consequences. Rice argues that causal claims depend on contextual factors such as background knowledge and the purpose for making the claim and that such claims are pluralistic due to the variety of kinds of evidence from which they can be inferred, among other factors. Focusing on causal claims in the biomedical and social sciences, he provides a critical overview of prominent theories of causation and evidence and argues that his view can overcome many of the problems that have been raised for these alternative views. Let's turn to the interview.
Hello, Julian Rees. Are you there? Hello,
I am.
Welcome to New Books and Philosophy.
Thank you very much. It's a great pleasure to be here and I'm very honored and pleased to be interviewed about my book.
Well, I'm very happy to be talking about it because the topic of causation is, I mean, as you go through in the book, it's historically very important, but obviously it's very important for how we live our lives. And you give a very interesting view, an inferentialist account, as you say, of the meaning of causal claims. So there's a lot of different working parts here. involving the evidence base from which we infer, we're entitled to infer causal claims, and then also what we infer to in terms of counterfactual dependencies, explanations, and so forth. So it's a very rich account that builds on a lot of the prior work that's been done about causation, at least since Hume, probably most famously since Hume.
Can you say a bit about how you got to this topic or how you got to philosophy and then how you came to write this particular book?
Absolutely. So I'm actually an economist by training. And so I have a first degree in economics and finance from Switzerland, from the University of St.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the overall focus of Julian Reiss’s book on causation, evidence, and inference?
0:00–4:59
2
How did Julian Reiss’s background in economics and philosophy of science lead him to write this book?
4:59–12:03
3
What is Reiss’s inferentialist account of causal claims and how are they inferred from evidence?
12:03–18:32
4
Why does Reiss argue that causal claims depend on contextual factors such as background knowledge and purpose?
18:32–25:31
5
Which traditional theories of causation (Hume, Lewis, INUS, etc.) does Reiss critique and why do they fail?
25:31–34:44
6
How does Reiss connect his view to hypothetical‑deductive reasoning and the problem of evidential content?
34:44–43:58
7
What is Reiss’s treatment of singular causal claims and the role of counterfactuals in those cases?
43:58–53:33
8
How does Reiss resolve the problem of nonsense correlations and what does he say about causal laws?
53:33–1:07:19
Speakers
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