Boletí­n Americanista  

Bert Leuridan,Erik Weber

Editors’ introduction to the special issue on the Causality and Explanation in the Sciences conference, held at the University of Ghent in September 2011

Daniel Eastman Little

The paper addresses the question of whether an actor-centered social ontology can admit of relatively autonomous social causal explanations.  It endorses the requirement that social structures and causes require “microfoundations.”  It argues... see more

Jan Baedke

This paper deals with the interrelationship between causal explanation and methodology in a relatively young discipline in biology: epigenetics. Based on cases from molecular and ecological epigenetics, I show that James Woodward’s interventionist account... see more

Francesca Pongiglione

The basis for adoption of pro-environment behaviour is the understanding of causal passages within climate dynamics. The understanding of the causes of climate change is necessary in order to be able to take mitigation actions  (the subject needs to ... see more

Menno Rol,Nancy Cartwright

To what use can causal claims established in good studies be put? We give examples of studies from which inaccurate inferences were made about target policy situations. The usual diagnosis is that the studies in question lack external validity, which mean... see more

Lorenzo Casini

How many notions of cause are there? The causality literature is witnessing a flourishing of pluralist positions. Here I focus on a recent debate on whether interpreting causality in terms of inferential relations commits one to semantic pluralism (Reiss,... see more

Edouard Machery

In this article, I argue that philosophers’ intuitions about reference are not more reliable than lay people’s and that intuitions about the reference of proper names and uses of proper names provide equally good evidence for theories of reference.

Michael Devitt

Machery argues: (1) that “philosophers’ intuitions about reference are not more reliable than lay people’s —if anything, they are probably worse”; (2) that “intuitions about the reference of proper names and uses of proper names provide equally good evide... see more

Ambrosio Velasco

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Christian Hennig

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Johanna Thoma

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