Making Things Happen

Making Things Happen: A Theory of Causal Explanation (2003) is the foundational text of the interventionist account of causation, written by philosopher James Woodward. The book's title is its thesis: causation is not a metaphysical relation between events but a practical capacity to make things happen through intervention.

Woodward argues that causal claims are claims about invariant generalizations — regularities that would continue to hold under a range of interventions. This replaces the Humean regularity theory, which cannot distinguish causal laws from accidental regularities, and the counterfactual theory, which gets lost in possible-worlds semantics. A generalization is causal precisely when it is invariant under the right kind of manipulation.

The book's influence extends far beyond philosophy. It has been cited in economics, epidemiology, computer science, and psychology as the clearest statement of what causal claims require: not correlation, not prediction, but counterfactual dependence under intervention.