Talk Title: Interventions without Illusions
Bringing interventionism into alignment with physics demand understanding the status of interventions. Interventions are surgical changes in the value of a variable that randomize connections to past causes. For the physicist, there are no interventions; no variable – as a matter of physical law – varies independently of its own past causes.
Professor Ismael will examine the origin of causal thinking in the logic of the embedded perspective and the difficult question of how one is to think about the status of causal structure looking through the physicist’s eyes.
Jenann Ismael
Jenann Ismael is the William H. Miller III Professor of Philosophy at Johns Hopkins University. She specializes in Philosophy of Physics and has broad interests that range from the metaphysics of science to philosophy of mind and cognitive science. She is the author of four books (most recently: Time: A Very Short Introduction) and numerous articles.