Conference and Workshop Support: Philosophical perspectives on causal reasoning in biology. Held at the University of Minnesota Minneapolis, MN in Spring 2011 and Spring 2012.

Causal reasoning plays a central role in biology and many of the more philosophically oriented disputes in biology, such as disputes about the levels of selection or disagreements about gene determination, are best framed in explicitly causal terms. Most philosophical accounts of causation have been developed on the assumption that the analysis of causes in simple systems will automatically (or 'in principle') apply to complex causal systems as well. Many philosophers of biology tend to assume the opposite: they are skeptical that philosophical analysis of highly idealized simple systems can provide a basis for elucidating causality in kinds of complex systems investigated by biologists. This workshop will open up inquiry by exploring the possibility that abstract accounts of causation can help inform analysis of causation in complex systems and that analyzing causation in complex systems can help inform philosophers' understanding of causation more generally.

This collaborative project will bring together biologists investigating complex causal systems, philosophers of biology analyzing causal models and experimentation in biology, and philosophers of causation who have developed abstract theories aimed at elucidating the nature of causation and causal reasoning. Given the overlap of interests, one might expect that these researchers would already be in conversation. But the exchange of ideas among these groups is limited, even between philosophers of biology and philosophers of causation. Participants will meet for two workshops, the first of which will is organized to initiate collaborative investigations into the nature of causation in biological systems, new analyses of the causal reasoning underlying the scientific investigation and explanation of the behavior of these systems, and models of how to understand causation in complex systems more generally. The results of these collaborative investigations will be discussed at the second workshop and for publication in Minnesota Studies for Philosophy of Science.