The Logical Form of Interventionism

This paper argues that, notwithstanding the remarkable popularity of Woodward’s (2003) interventionist analysis of causation, the exact definitional details of that theory are surprisingly little understood. There exists a discrepancy in the literature between the insufficient appreciation of the logical details of interventionism, on the one hand, and the amount of theoretical work interventionism is expected to do, on the other. The first part of the paper distinguishes four significantly different readings of the logical form of Woodward’s analysis and identifies the two readings that best capture Woodward’s intentions in (2003) and (2008a), respectively. In the second part, I show that these different readings are not clearly kept apart in the literature, and, moreover, that neither of them can do all the work that interventionists would like the theory to do.