California Institute of Technology

Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences

Christopher R. Hitchcock's Research

Most of my current research focuses on the concept of causation. This work falls into several categories:

Actual Causation: Inter-disciplinary work has led to development of new causal modeling techniques. This work has largely ignored the notion of 'actual causation,' which is central to moral and legal responsibility. I have been working on accounts of actual causation from within the causal modeling framework.

Causal and Moral Judgment: There is evidence suggesting that our moral evaluations can influence our causal judgments. But parallel effects occur in cases that do not have any moral component. I am exploring the consequences of these finding for our understanding of causation.

Causal Learning: I am currently involved in an interdisciplinary collaborative project, sponsored by the McDonnell foundation, exploring the nature of causal learning.

In addition to my work on causation, I have been working off and on and a number of other projects in the philosophy of science.

Historical Linguistics: I have been examining the logic of certain probabilistic methods for inferring common ancestry among languages.

Epistemic Probability: I have been addressing a number of puzzles that arise from the use of probability to model partial beliefs.

Model Selection: I have been studying the connection between the statistical problem of model selection and other problems in philosophy of science, particularly the role of prediction in theory confirmation.


Last updated: March 20, 2009 14:21
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