Causal Models: How People Think About the World and Its Alternatives

by Steven Sloman

Human beings are active agents who can think. To understand how thought serves action requires understanding how people conceive of the relation between cause and effect, between action and outcome. In cognitive terms, how do people construct and reason with the causal models we use to represent our world? A revolution is occurring in how statisticians, philosophers, and computer scientists answer this question. Those fields have ushered in new insights about causal models by thinking about how to represent causal structure mathematically, in a framework that uses graphs and probability theory to develop what are called causal Bayesian networks. The framework starts with the idea that the purpose of causal structure is to understand and predict the effects of intervention. How does intervening on one thing affect other things? This is not a question merely about probability (or logic), but about action. The framework offers a new understanding of mind: Thought is about the effects of intervention and cognition is thus intimately tied to actions that take place either in the actual physical world or in imagination, in counterfactual worlds. The book offers a conceptual introduction to the key mathematical ideas, presenting them in a non-technical way, focusing on the intuitions rather than the theorems. It tries to show why the ideas are important to understanding how people explain things and why thinking not only about the world as it is but the world as it could be is so central to human action. The book reviews the role of causality, causal models, and intervention in the basic human cognitive functions: decision making, reasoning, judgment, categorization, inductive inference, language, and learning. In short, the book offers a discussion about how people think, talk, learn, and explain things in causal terms, in terms of action and manipulation.

Genres: Psychology, Philosophy, Nonfiction, Academic

224 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2005

Reviews

[Kevin · Rating 2 out of 5]

A clearly written introduction to the area of cognitive science which studies the type of logical/cognitive structure which arguably handles how we can intervene in the world. I would have found the book more useful had it included more links to other areas of brain science and/or more real-world examples. Nevertheless, it does suffice as a quick and compact introductory text.

[Tory S. Anderson · Rating 4 out of 5]

I used it as a proper to reading the definitive works on the subject by Judea Pearl. Unlike Pearl, this book emphasizes human thought and process with only a cursory overview of the mathematical formality. It is well-reasoned with excellent examples and clear points. In the end it did seem a little un-targeted, making a general "this is important stuff, worthy of attention" statement, but definitely insightful overall.

The subject focuses on the human plausability of causal models, models of the "why" of things, for how we think and make many of our decisions. Sloman didn't come up with the bulk if what he's talking about, but he is making strides in connecting it to human psychology.

[Henri Tournyol du Clos · Rating 2 out of 5]

This collection of tediously obvious banalities is somewhat painful to read and I never finished it. That is a pity, because Sloman can obviously do better: The Knowledge Illusion ( https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3... ), also written for the general public, albeit a dozen years later, is a really insightful - if still somewhat at times watery - read.

[Prahlad Saldanha · Rating 4 out of 5]

The first half introduces the interventionist account of causality accessibly. The second half connects causality with other topics in cognitive psychology such as how we learn and how we understand language.

[Richard]

(I dunno — looks intriguing, but do I really need that deep of an education in Bayes’ theorem, for example? It should be mentioned that the single two-star review here actually reads more like a three or four star review, and the two more detailed reviews over on Amazon are four and five stars. Hmmm.)
­