About me

I am a philosopher of science working mostly on problems related to theory of explanation, and epistemology of causation. That is, I seek answers to the following kinds of questions: What is it that makes a piece of information explanatory of some event or state of affairs? How does explanation differ from other epistemic outputs of science such as prediction or “mere” truthful description of the world? How can we reliably learn about what causes what? How can we reliably estimate the magnitude of influence that particular causes have on their effects?

Currently I work as a researcher in the Coincidence Analysis (CNA) project based at the Department of Philosophy at University of Bergen, Norway. CNA is a so-called configurational comparative method of causal modeling and discovery, based on a (M)INUS-theory of causation. My work in the project has two overarching aims. One is to develop the methodological protocol and software implementation of CNA in various ways, for example by developing a concept of robustness suitable for configurational comparative methods, and implementing a robustness test for CNA analyses based on this concept. The other aim is to study the philosophical underpinnings of CNA by comparing CNA to other causal discovery and modeling frameworks that are based on a different conceptualization of the causal relation itself, such as causal Bayes nets, for example.

I have a long-standing interest in the role of mechanism concepts and mechanistic evidence in the sciences, particularly in the fields of biology, medicine, and the social sciences (see e.g. this book), as well as in the interventionist theory of causality and causal explanation (see e.g. this paper).

Some assorted materials related and unrelated to my work can be found on GitHub. I hardly ever tweet. You can write to me at veli-pekka [dot] parkkinen [at] uib [.] no.