Theories of Causality in Analytic Philosophy

Abstract This article provides an overview and critical discussion of major approaches to causality in contemporary analytic philosophy, with a focus on their relevance to the social sciences. After a discussion of regularity accounts of causality in the spirit of logical empiricism (Sections 2–3), four important groups of more recent postpositivist approaches are examined: counterfactual accounts of causality within the metaphysical framework of similarity-ordered possible worlds (Section 4), temporal accounts and causal process accounts that operate at the level of physics (Sections 5–6), interventionist accounts of causality (Section 7), and, finally, the theory of causal nets, which does not attempt to provide a definition of causality but characterizes causality by theoretical axioms (Sections 8–9). The last account is most general and transdisciplinary, being applicable across all scientific fields. Section 10 addresses issues concerning causal relations between values of variables—as opposed to relations between variables themselves—such as causal preemption and overdetermination. The last section is devoted to causal–mechanistic models of explanation.