Is causation deterministic or probabilistic? A critique of Frosch and Johnson-Laird (2011)

ABSTRACT

The mental model view of causation is deterministic, which claims that “A causes B means that given A, the occurrence of B is necessary” (Johnson-Laird et al., 2017). Frosch and Johnson-Laird [2011). Is everyday causation deterministic or probabilistic? Acta Psychologica, 137, 280–291. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.actpsy.2011.01.015] provide an empirical study to support this proposal. Several facets of causal pluralism established in previous works motivate us to suspect the monistic determinism. Therefore, we analyse Frosch et al.’s experimental issues from logical and methodological perspectives, such as the hidden circular argument, the insufficient and unnecessary condition of their tasks as the criterion of determinism and the biases toward deterministic reading through several hints. Our redesigned experiments from three perspectives—concept, judgment, and inference—coherently demonstrate that people have a pluralistic rather than a monistic perspective of the modal conception of causation. We account for modal pluralism from two perspectives. Several theoretical and methodological relationships with prior work are also discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Causation deterministic
• mental model theory
• modal concept

Acknowledgements

We would like to give our sincere thanks to Simo Stephan, Sam Johnson and an anonymous Reviewer for their helpful comments and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of Experiments 1–3 are available on request from the corresponding author. The data are not publicly available due to privacy or ethical restrictions.

(The questionnaires for Experiment 1–3 were included among a set of materials for experiments on unrelated topics, which involved ethics and personality tests. These questionnaires as a whole have signed a private agreement with the subjects.)

The data that support the findings of Experiment 4 (which actually provide the strongest evidence for our claim) are openly available in https://figshare.com/s/e0bfeb66e909dcea0bff, with Digital Object Identifier 10.6084/m9.figshare.15065127.

Notes

1 Frosch and Johnson-Laird (2011) probe people’s modal conceptions on three kinds of causal relations: cause, enable, and prevent. In our present we mainly focus on how people understand “cause”, because it is the most controversial and representative issue among three causal relations both in philosophy and psychology. And some frameworks, Bayesian models for example, do not distinct between “cause” and “enable”. Given “prevent” is the counterpart of “cause”, our findings will also shed light on it.

2 The negative belief bias here has subtle difference from Evans et al. (2001) where it means decreased acceptance of unbelievable conclusions.

3 The terms "top down" and "bottom up" were borrowed from Kitcher (1985, 1989). But their very meanings here do not strictly correspond to Kitcher’s explication.

4 We owe this perspective to our Review Sam Johnson and thank him for suggesting us this discussion.

5 We owe this section of discussion to our Review Sam Johnson and thank him for suggesting us this perspective and some prominent researches.

6 Here we are not querying the appropriateness of iterated learning progress as the method aiming to distinguish various Bayesian models, rather we just point out that the determinism may be a side-effect of this progress.

7 We thank our Reviewer Simo Stephan for suggesting us this discussion and some literatures.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China under General Grant <number 30170901>.