Hunting Causes and Using Them: Approaches in Philosophy and Economics

Hunting Causes and Using Them: Approaches in Philosophy and Economics (HC&UT) is about notions of causality appropriate to the sciences, mostly generic causal claims (causal laws), and especially notions that connect causality with probability. Most of the work for the book is associated with the project ‘Causality: Metaphysics and Methods’. This project argued that metaphysics – our account of what causal laws are or what general causal claims say – should march hand-in-hand with our ways of establishing them. It should be apparent, given the kind of thing we think causality is, why our methods are good for finding it. If our metaphysics does not mesh with and underwrite the methods we are willing to trust, we should be wary of both.