Objection:
democratic peace: democratic countries do not fight each other
Reason for causation: we want to control saturation
Critiques:
not a causation study
it demonstrates democratic peace, not "democrat countries are more peaceful"
hard to opeerationalize "war" and "democracy"
should test if correlation hold on larger dataset
Difference between law and correlation:
Law: general, no reference to particular objects, time, or places
Law: support counterfactual statements (predictive?)
Do (causal) social law exists?: it exists if one believes social science theory are generalizable. When human have "creativity"
How do you measure creativity?
Quantum physics can generate "real random" much like definition of "creativity"
Do human have creativity
Yes: creativity from free-well
No: creativity should be something entirely new, doesn't exists in society. One would justify something is a innovation if the innovation should happens at a later time, but this justification is self-defeating by create the innovation.
Social laws can be formulated in another vocabulary (like physical science)
Is human predictable: Consider chaos theory
Yes:
No: (it is not predictable in terms of current technology)
Most famous definition
Hume's causality: an object followed by another, and where all the objects, similar to the first, are followed by objects similar to the second. Or, in other words, where, if the first object had not been, the second never had existed.
Critiques:
first sentence: empirical regularity, true generalization
second sentence: counterfactual
There is no causality in linear regression
Thomas Reid's causality: controlled change of variable limitation
only done so by human (because in this case we assume human have free well)
can't go back into history (modality assumption)
can't identify which level is the true cause if applied reductionism
isolation of confounding variable
adjusted definition: A necessary and sufficient condition for X to be a direct cause of Y with respect to some variable set V is that there be a possible intervention on X that will change Y (or the probability distribution of Y ) when all other variables in V besides X and Y are held fixed at some value by interventions.
Two advantage
interventionist can give causality without given law
genuine(true) and spurious(false) generalizations
policy recommendations need causal claims to justify. (Justifying spreading of Democracy). The need for causation is because we want to control things.
interventionist vs. "regularity account"
a natural law: in its definition, should be context-less
interventionist can rely on exact context to produce "imagined" outcome Since we can't "observe causality", we need to establish a standard to decide whether a causal statement has "causality credibility"
regularity account: gains its credibility by generalization
interventionist: gains its credibility by interventionist
Justification for linear model?
it might be non-linear
Regularity: let X in set XS, Y in set YS, for all X and Y...
definition
limitation: not actual cause, interference, don't capture full picture
Interventionist: a definition in terms of intervention
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