Refining regularity theories of causation through informativeness

In this presentation, I introduce a significant problem for regularity theories of causation and propose a solution. I begin by providing an introduction to the regularity theory of causation as developed by Michael Baumgartner and Christoph Falk in their 2023 paper, Boolean Difference-making: A Modern Regularity Theory of Causation. I then introduce a critical but previously unrecognized issue: I present an example of a causal structure that the theory fails to distinguish from other structures causally incompatible with it, even when optimal evidence for the first structure is available. This demonstrates that the theory is unable to fully reduce this structure to regularity relations, undermining the theory's goal of providing a reductive account of causation. Finally, I propose a solution by introducing a new criterion of informativeness based on falsifiability. Incorporating this criterion into Baumgartner and Falk’s theory restores the theory’s capacity to provide a reductive definition of type-level causation.