Pawel Kawalec (Visiting Scholar)
Catholic University of Lublin, Poland
Academic Year
Empiricist Methodology and Causality

Having identified the pitfalls of Carnap’s immense attempt at a formal construction of epistemology of science in his book Structural Reliabilism, Pawel Kawalec is now focused on the nature of causal discovery and modeling. A close study of paradigmatic cases of actual causal discovery in nonexperimental research (esp. the causes of cholera in the 19th c. and smoking as a cause of lung cancer around the first half of the 20th) led him to elaborate procedural criteria which constrain kinds of data supporting causal conclusions. In the monograph Modeling Causality –-the writing of which consumed most of his academic year while visiting the Center – Pawel subsumes all causal models prevailing in non-experimental research under the procedural criteria, which leads to a new model of explanation tailored for the social sciences. While in Pittsburgh he has combined this interest with family explorations of the Pennsylvania railway system and Native American trails. When his book gets published he will recall the wit and decency of persons met here in occasional aquarelles.