An Epistemology of Causal Inference from Experiment

The manipulationist account of causation provides a framework for assessing causal claims and the experiments used to test them. But its pertinence to the more general class of scientific experiments-particularly those experiments not explicitly designed for testing causal claims-is less clear. I aim to show (1) that the set of causal inferences afforded by any experiment is determined solely on the basis of contrasting case structures that I call "experimental series" and (2) that the conditions that suffice for causal inference obtain quite commonly, even among "ordinary" scientific experiments not explicitly designed for the testing of causal claims.