I’m not familiar with the philosophical tradition that would be incompatible with the way CDT uses ‘causality’. It quite possibly exists and my lack of respect for philosophical tradition leaves me ignorant of such.
From my perspective, it’s a shame that you have little regard for philosophical tradition. But as someone who is intimately familiar with the philosophical literature on causation, it seems to me that the sense of “causal” in causal decision theory, while imprecise, is perfectly compatible with most traditional approaches. I don’t see any reason to think the “causal” in “causal decision theory” is incompatible with regularity theories, probabilistic theories, counterfactual theories, conserved quantity theories, agency/manipulation/intervention theories, primitivism, power theories, or mechanism theories. It might be a tense relation between CDT and projectivist theories, but I suspect that even there, you will not find outright incompatibility.
For a nice paper in the overlap between decision theory and the philosophy of causation and causal inference, you might take a look at the paper Conditioning and Intervening (pdf) by Meek and Glymour if you haven’t seen it already. Of course, Glymour’s account of causation is not very different from Pearl’s, so maybe you don’t think of this as philosophy.
But as someone who is intimately familiar with the philosophical literature on causation, it seems to me that the sense of “causal” in causal decision theory, while imprecise, is perfectly compatible with most traditional approaches.
That was my impression (without sufficient confidence that I wished to outright contradict on facts.)
I’m not familiar with the philosophical tradition that would be incompatible with the way CDT uses ‘causality’. It quite possibly exists and my lack of respect for philosophical tradition leaves me ignorant of such.
From my perspective, it’s a shame that you have little regard for philosophical tradition. But as someone who is intimately familiar with the philosophical literature on causation, it seems to me that the sense of “causal” in causal decision theory, while imprecise, is perfectly compatible with most traditional approaches. I don’t see any reason to think the “causal” in “causal decision theory” is incompatible with regularity theories, probabilistic theories, counterfactual theories, conserved quantity theories, agency/manipulation/intervention theories, primitivism, power theories, or mechanism theories. It might be a tense relation between CDT and projectivist theories, but I suspect that even there, you will not find outright incompatibility.
For a nice paper in the overlap between decision theory and the philosophy of causation and causal inference, you might take a look at the paper Conditioning and Intervening (pdf) by Meek and Glymour if you haven’t seen it already. Of course, Glymour’s account of causation is not very different from Pearl’s, so maybe you don’t think of this as philosophy.
That was my impression (without sufficient confidence that I wished to outright contradict on facts.)