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Understanding Regression

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 January 2023

James Woodward
James Woodward*
Affiliation:
California Institute of Technology
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Although statistical techniques like regression analysis and path analysis are widely used in the biomedical, behavioral and social sciences to make causal inferences there has been surprisingly little philosophical discussion of the details of such techniques and of the conceptions of causation and explanation implicit in them. There also has been relatively little attempt to compare such techniques with various probabilistic models of causation and explanation in the philosophical literature.

In this paper I explore, for reasons of space in a very sketchy and schematic way, some issues in philosophy of science raised by regression analysis. One general conclusion I reach is that it is considerably less obvious than one might suppose that the philosophical theories alluded to above are plausibly viewed as reconstructions of regression techniques.

Type
Part VIII. Formal Sciences
Information
PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association , Volume 1988 , Issue 1: Volume One: Contributed Papers 1988 , 1988 , pp. 255 - 269
Copyright
Copyright © Philosophy of Science Association 1988

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