I welcome the chance to revisit my review of Making Things Happen and the book itself (Woodward 2003; Strevens 2007) in the light of Woodward’s response to the review (henceforth “Woodward’s reply”). In what follows I hope to provide a surer footing for some of the claims made in the original review, to address the new definition of unrelativized causation proposed in Woodward’s reply, and to e...

Exploring biological meaning from microarray data is very important but remains a great challenge. Here, we developed three new statistics: linear combination test, quadratic test and de-correlation test to identify differentially expressed pathways from gene expression profile. We apply our statistics to two rheumatoid arthritis datasets. Notably, our results reveal three significant pathways ...

However, philosophers now have no excuse for overlooking the important developments in this approach. For Judea Pearl in his landmark work (2000) has developed a theory that applies the structural equations approach to token-causation. Subsequently, in collaboration with David Halpern (2001), he has extended and simplified the theory. More recently, Christopher Hitchcock has written a series of...

KINSELLA AND TINSLEY (2004) IS beautifully written, infused with keen insights, in some ways solidly predicated upon libertarianism and praxeology, and yet, and yet, much as I enthusiastically agree with goodly portions of it and am even inspired by them, I cannot see my way clear to accepting all of their insights. The present paper is devoted to a critique of those parts of the paper with whi...

Taxation and Internal Migration: Evidence from the Swiss Census Using Community-Level Variation in Income Tax Rates We investigate the relationship between income tax rate variation and internal migration for the unique case of Switzerland, whose system of determining tax rates primarily at the community level results in enough variation to permit analysis of their influence on migration. Speci...

This essay is concerned with concentrations of entities, which play an important— albeit often overlooked—role in scientific explanation. First, I discuss an example from molecular biology to show that concentrations can play an irreducible causal role. Second, I provide a preliminary philosophical analysis of this causal role, suggesting some implications for extant theories of causation. I co...

Research is often conducted in agricultural education with the purpose of explaining and/or predicting phenomena. This research is frequently labeled associational, relational, correlational, a m facto or causal-comparative depending primarily upon which author one studied when learning about research. The purpose of explaining is most often addressed by what is known as the correlation questio...

This paper deals with the problem of estimating the probability of causation, that is, the probability that one event was the real cause of another, in a given scenario. Starting from structural-semantical deenitions of the probabilities of necessary or suucient causation (or both), we show how to bound these quantities from data obtained in experimental and observational studies, under general...

The multivariate lognormal model is a basic pricing model for derivatives with multiple underlying processes, for example, spread options. However, the market observation of implied correlation skew examplifies how inaccurate the constant correlation assumption in the multivariate lognormal model can be. In this paper, we study alternative modeling approaches that generate implied correlation s...

This paper is intended as a stimulus to wider discussion on the nature of cause–effect models, and their role in educational research.It is clearlynot intendedtobedefinitive. Nor is it based on new evidence. It considers in turn models based on no causation at all, models based on causation alongside other explanatory processes, models based solely on causation, and variations of the latter. Am...