Causality and normal states in economics and other disciplines

In this article, past and recent accounts of causality and the notion of normal state adopted in various disciplines are linked to the philosophical insights of John Stuart Mill and Piero Sraffa in order to provide a particular focus on economic theory. A simple neuron model and the theory of natural price in Adam Smith are taken as typical applications of causality plus normality and serve to argue that the deviations from a normal state can play two roles in economic theory: (1) the selecting of causes and causal explanations and (2) agency represented by the variables of a causal model.