Hybrid Causal Representations

The main goal of this chapter is to defend a new view on causal reasoning, a hybrid representation account. In both psychology and philosophy, different frameworks of causal reasoning compete, each endowed with its distinctive strengths and weaknesses and its preferred domains of application. Three frameworks are presented that either focus on dependencies, dispositions, or processes. Our main claim is that despite the beauty of a parsimonious unitary account, there is little reason to assume that people are restricted to one type of representation of causal scenarios. In contrast to causal pluralism, which postulates the coexistence of different representations in causal reasoning, our aim is to show that competing representations do not only coexist, they can also actively influence each other. In three empirical case studies, we demonstrate how causal dependency, causal dispositional, and causal process representations mutually interact in generating complex representations driving causal inferences.