Abstract

This chapter defends a deflationary, or ‘quietist’ account of causation in science. It begins by laying out the elements of four central philosophical theories of causation, namely the regularity, counterfactual, probabilistic and process accounts. It then proceeds to briefly criticise them. While the criticisms are essentially renditions of arguments that are well-known in the literature, the conclusion that is derived from these is new. It is argued that the limitations of each of the theories point to a deflationary or quietist approach to causation in science. The practical focus is on interventionist methods for causal inference in physics and biology, and on the extant debates within the philosophy of each discipline as to how best to approach such methods. It is then argued that none of the four central theories proposed can completely explain or reduce the methods of causal inference that appear in each science. Yet, each theory provides partial insights into some of the grounds of causal inference and causal discovery. It is consequently suggested that we should retain the various methodological lessons without committing expressly to any metaphysics of causation.