Causation and Experimentation

In the last fifty years or so, the debate on causality has been constantly growing. This has been favoured by the idea that causality can be taken in a probabilistic fashion. There are several approaches to causality in the literature, such as the regularity, mechanistic, counterfactual, and manipulative. The latter, namely the view according to which causality is linked to the idea of intervention, has a long tradition in econometrics and statistics, and is gaining increasing attention on the part of philosophers of science. For instance, Huw Price’s agency view links causality to the possibility of producing or modifying something in order to obtain something else, and James Woodward makes experimentation the main ingredient of his definition of causality. Moreover, it is widely recognised that experimentation has a role to play in detecting causal relations. This paper addresses the link between causation and experimentation through a sketchy overview of the literature on the topic. Its purpose is to give an idea of the breath of the ongoing debate, and suggest possible connections between the viewpoints developed by philosophers of science, statisticians and econometricians.