Jennifer McDonald (The Graduate Center CUNY)
In this paper, I defend strong proportionality against what I take to be its principal objection — that proportionality fails to preserve common sense causal intuitions — by articulating independently plausible constraints on representing causal situations. I first assume the interventionist formulation of proportionality, following Woodward. This views proportionality as a relational constraint on variable selection in causal modeling that requires that changes in the cause variable line up with those in the effect variable. I then argue that the principal objection derives from a failure to recognize two constraints on variable selection presupposed by interventionism: exhaustivity and exclusivity.
