The London School of Economics and Political Science has announced that the 2005 Lakatos Award of £10,000 for an outstanding contribution to the philosophy of science goes to James Woodward, Caltech's J.O. and Juliette Koepfli Professor of the Humanities, for his book Making Things Happen: A Theory of Causal Explanation (Oxford University Press, 2003).

Woodward will visit the London School of Economics in May 2006 to receive the award and deliver the Lakatos Award Lecture.

An interest in the notion of causal explanation pervades both ordinary and scientific life: we wonder why our computer crashed (that is, what caused it to crash), whether the MMR vaccine caused increased levels of autism, whether increase in the money supply caused inflation in a particular economy at a particular time, and so on. But it has proved very difficult to provide a satisfactory analysis of what precisely is involved in the notion of cause and of causal explanation--particularly in cases where, as in all those just cited, the system at issue is clearly a complex and multifactorial one. Woodward, extending the work of a number of others, develops a manipulationist or interventionist account of causation and explanation, according to which causal relationships are those that can be exploited for purposes of intervention and control and are, moreover, invariant under intervention. He argues that this analysis sheds light not just on the cases from social science and biomedicine, where its ingredients were first developed, but on causal reasoning across the board.

The Lakatos Award is made possible by a generous endowment from the Latsis Foundation, and is given in memory of the former London School of Economics professor Imre Lakatos.