CANCELLED TF colloquium Naftali Weinberger

This event has been cancelled.

Speaker: Naftali Weinberger (Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy)

Title: Causal Stability

Abstract: A key dimension for evaluating the success of an intervention is whether it brings about an outcome that will be sustainable even once the intervention is no longer being applied. Whether we’re talking about psychotherapy or chemotherapy, the goal is not simply to change the state of the target system, but to bring it to new equilibrium that will persist once the treatment is removed. Relatedly, to design a proper intervention on a system one must understand that system’s tendencies to resist change. Sustainability and resilience are both examples of causal stability. In my talk, I explain why existing approaches to causal stability, which treat it as the invariance of a causal relationship across different sets of (static) background factors, are unable to represent the dynamical feedback loops that ensure stability. In contrast, dynamic causal models (Iwasaki and Simon, 1994) can do so, and point to an alternative conception of causal stability as persistence in light of perturbations. I draw implications of this alternative conception for public policy, causal generalizability, and cognitive science.