The class will meet on Tuesdays, 4.00-600pm, in the Dennes Room (234 Moses Hall).

This class will function as a reading group, working through many of the chapters in a collection on causation currently in press:

Alison Gopnik and Laura Schulz (eds.), Causal Learning: Psychology, Philosophy and Computation (Oxford:

Oxford University Press).

Each week a graduate student will open the discussion with a 10-15 minute outline and comment on the chapter being discussed.

Drafts of the chapters will be e-mailed to participants.

Students taking the class for credit will be required to turn in one term paper, 10-15  pages in length.  Students must discuss the topic of their paper with one of the instructors in advance.

Interventionism

James Woodward, ‘Interventionist Theories of Causation in Psychological Perspective’

Laura Schulz and Alison Gopnik, 'Learning from Doing:  Causal learning and Intervention'

Christopher Hitchcock, ‘On the Importance of Causal Taxonomy’

Andrew Meltzoff, ‘Infants’ Causal Learning: Intervention, Observation, Imitation’

John Campbell, ‘An Interventionist Approach to Causation in Psychology’.

York  Hagmeyer et. al., 'Causal  Learning Through Intervention'.

Probability

Editor’s ‘Introduction’

Schulz, Gopnik and Richardson, 'A Dialogue on the Principles Underlying Causal Learning in Children'

David Danks, ‘Theory Unification and Graphical Models in Human Categorization’/Bob Rehder, ‘Essentialism as a Generative Theory of Classification’

Clark Glymour, ‘Learning the Structure of Deterministic Systems’

Explanation

Henry Wellman and David Liu, ‘Causal Reasoning as Informed by the Early Development of Explanations’

Michael Strevens, ‘Why Represent Causal Relations?’