Evidential Pluralism, Causal Pluralism, and an Integrative Theory of Causation

Evidential Pluralism, a position emerging from the Russo-Williamson Thesis claims that establishing causation in the sciences requires both difference-making and mechanistic evidence. We develop its ontological foundations and formulate an integrative type-level theory of causation. We argue that causality involves two necessary conditions (manipulability and mechanism) that are jointly sufficient for a relation to be causal so that X causes Y if and only if [1] one can, at least in principle, manipulate (the probability of) events of type Y by producing events of type X in a context C and [2] there is a mechanism linking events of type X to events of type Y. We show that such a Manipulationist-Mechanistic theory is not only adequate to exemplary causal claims in biomedicine and economics but also immune to the counterexamples troubling monistic theories.