ABSTRACT
Jim Woodward has provided us a monumental review of his views on causality and of many of the disagreements he and I have had about them. I suppose that the most efficient thing I can do in reply is to explain directly what I believe about many of the same issues. As with Woodward’s discussion here, I will consider only systems of linear equations and their causal interpretation. In particular I will focus on what I call “epistemically convenient linear deterministic systems”. They look like this:
xn c = Σan1xn + un where causes are on the right and effects on the left and where each u can take any values in its range simultaneously with any combination of values for the other us. This means that Woodward’s interventions are always possible since each right-hand-side variable can vary independently of all others.
