Causation and Laws

Edited by Markus Schrenk (Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf)
Assistant editor: Daian Bica (Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf)
About this topic
Summary Many accounts of causation, i.e. theories that answer to the question when an event e can be said to have been caused by an event c, say that c-type events and e-type events have to be connected by a law of nature: a law that says that all C events are followed by E events. So, for example, saying that throwing this powder into this glass of water caused an explosion is, roughly, true only if it is a natural law that that kind of powder (magnesium, say) explodes when in contact with H2O. A contrary view says that causation is singular, i.e., whether two events are cause and effect, does not depend on the respective event kinds being related by a law.
Key works For the classic expression of the nomicity of causation see: Davidson 1995. For the locus classicus of the singularist account see: Ducasse 1966
Introductions Carroll 1994
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Contents
187 found
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  1. Causal Necessity and the Future: Two Views.Steven M. Duncan - manuscript
    In this paper I offer an alternative to the standard, mechanistic/fatalistic account of causal necessity, one compatible with the existence of laws of nature but not deterministic in the way this is usually understood.
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  2. Explaining Experience In Nature: The Foundations Of Logic And Apprehension.Steven Ericsson-Zenith - forthcoming - Institute for Advanced Science & Engineering.
    At its core this book is concerned with logic and computation with respect to the mathematical characterization of sentient biophysical structure and its behavior. -/- Three related theories are presented: The first of these provides an explanation of how sentient individuals come to be in the world. The second describes how these individuals operate. And the third proposes a method for reasoning about the behavior of individuals in groups. -/- These theories are based upon a new explanation of experience in (...)
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  3. Causal Decision Theory, Context, and Determinism.Calum McNamara - forthcoming - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research.
    The classic formulation of causal decision theory (CDT) appeals to counterfactuals. It says that you should aim to choose an option that would have a good outcome, were you to choose it. However, this version of CDT faces trouble if the laws of nature are deterministic. After all, the standard theory of counterfactuals says that, if the laws are deterministic, then if anything—including the choice you make—were different in the present, either the laws would be violated or the distant past (...)
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  4. Determinismus Kausalität Freiheit - Wissenschaftstheoretische Überlegungen zur Willensfreiheitsdebatte.Hüttemann Andreas - 2024 - Frankfurt: Klostermann.
    Let us assume that human behavior is subject to laws of nature. These are either deterministic or indeterministic. Prima facie in both cases our behavior appears to be excused. For it seems as if, in the case of deterministic laws, we cannot behave differently than we actually do. In the case of indeterministic laws, it seems as if we are not the originators of this behavior, because how we behave depends on chance. There is a tension between the scientific characterization (...)
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  5. The Temporal Asymmetry of Causation.Alison Fernandes - 2023 - Cambridge University Press.
    Causes always seem to come prior to their effects. What might explain this asymmetry? Causation's temporal asymmetry isn't straightforwardly due to a temporal asymmetry in the laws of nature—the laws are, by and large, temporally symmetric. Nor does the asymmetry appear due to an asymmetry in time itself. This Element examines recent empirical attempts to explain the temporal asymmetry of causation: statistical mechanical accounts, agency accounts and fork asymmetry accounts. None of these accounts are complete yet and a full explanation (...)
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  6. Newton's “law-first” epistemology and “matter-first” metaphysics.Caleb Hazelwood - 2023 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 101 (C):40-47.
    Much has been written on Newton’s concept of matter, as well as Newton’s laws. Meanwhile, the metaphysical and epistemological relationships between these two principal features of Newtonian philosophy are relatively unexplored. Among the existing accounts of the relationship between bodies and laws, two are especially compelling: the “law-constitutive” approach from Katherine Brading and the “formal-cause” approach from Zvi Biener and Eric Schliesser. Both accounts argue that Newton’s bodies are (at least partially) metaphysically dependent on the laws. That is, according to (...)
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  7. Law-Abiding Causal Decision Theory.Timothy Luke Williamson & Alexander Sandgren - 2023 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 74 (4):899-920.
    In this paper we discuss how Causal Decision Theory should be modified to handle a class of problematic cases involving deterministic laws. Causal Decision Theory, as it stands, is problematically biased against your endorsing deterministic propositions (for example it tells you to deny Newtonian physics, regardless of how confident you are of its truth). Our response is that this is not a problem for Causal Decision Theory per se, but arises because of the standard method for assessing the truth of (...)
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  8. Interacting Minds in the Physical World.Alin C. Cucu - 2022 - Dissertation, University of Lausanne
    Mental causation, idea that it is us – via our minds – who cause bodily actions is as commonsensical as it is indispensable for our understanding of ourselves as rational agents. Somewhat less uncontroversial, but nonetheless widespread (at least among ordinary people) is the idea that the mind is non-physical, following the intuition that what is physical can neither act nor think nor judge morally. Taken together, and cast into a metaphysical thesis, the two intuitions yield interactive dualism: the view (...)
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  9. Causal counterfactuals without miracles or backtracking.J. Dmitri Gallow - 2022 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 107 (2):439-469.
    If the laws are deterministic, then standard theories of counterfactuals are forced to reject at least one of the following conditionals: 1) had you chosen differently, there would not have been a violation of the laws of nature; and 2) had you chosen differently, the initial conditions of the universe would not have been different. On the relevant readings—where we hold fixed factors causally independent of your choice—both of these conditionals appear true. And rejecting either one leads to trouble for (...)
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  10. Causality and determination, powers and agency: Anscombean perspectives.Jesse M. Mulder, Thomas Müller, Dawa Ometto & Niels van Miltenburg - 2022 - Synthese 200 (6):1-16.
    Anscombe’s 1971 inaugural lecture at Cambridge, entitled ‘Causality and Determination’, has had a lasting influence on a remarkably broad range of philosophers and philosophical debates, touching on fundamental topics in philosophy of science, action theory, the free will debate, epistemology, philosophy of mind, and metaphysics. Especially where anti-reductionist or pluralist strands of philosophical thought are being seriously considered, one should not be surprised to find references to Anscombe’s lecture. Moreover, there appears to be a growing interest in Anscombe’s comprehensive philosophical (...)
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  11. What does causality have to do with necessity?Helen Steward - 2022 - Synthese 200 (2):1-25.
    In her ‘Causality and Determination’, Anscombe argues for the strong thesis that despite centuries of philosophical assumption to the contrary, the supposition that causality and necessity have something essential to do with one another is baseless. In this paper, I assess Anscombe’s arguments and endorse her conclusion. I then attempt to argue that her arguments remain highly relevant today, despite the fact that most popular general views of causation today are firmly probabilistic in orientation and thus show no trace of (...)
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  12. The far-reaching impact of dispositionalism?: Travis Dumsday: Dispositionalism and the metaphysics of science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019, 232pp, £22.99 PB. [REVIEW]Vassilis Livanios - 2021 - Metascience 30 (3):361-364.
  13. Causality and determination revisited.Dawa Ometto - 2021 - Synthese 199 (5-6):14993-15013.
    It seems to be a platitude that there must be a close connection between causality and the laws of nature: the laws somehow cover in general what happens in each specific case of causation. But so-called singularists disagree, and it is often thought that the locus classicus for that kind of dissent is Anscombe's famous Causality & Determination. Moreover, it is often thought that Anscombe's rejection of determinism is premised on singularism. In this paper, I show that this is a (...)
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  14. The Case Against Powers.Walter Ott - 2021 - In Stathis Psillos, Benjamin Hill & Henrik Lagerlund (eds.), Causal Powers in Science: Blending Historical and Conceptual Perspectives. Oxford University Press. pp. 149-167.
    Powers ontologies are currently enjoying a resurgence. This would be dispiriting news for the moderns; in their eyes, to imbue bodies with powers is to slide back into the scholastic slime from which they helped philosophy crawl. I focus on Descartes’s ‘little souls’ argument, which points to a genuine and, I think persisting, defect in powers theories. The problem is that an Aristotelian power is intrinsic to whatever has it. Once this move is accepted, it becomes very hard to see (...)
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  15. Metaphysical Foundations of Causation: Powers or Laws of Nature?Dmytro Sepetyi - 2021 - Metaphysica 22 (2):295-309.
    In this article, I discuss Richard Swinburne’s case for the conception of substance causation, identified with the substances-powers-liabilities account of causation, versus the conception of event causation, identified with alternative accounts. I specify the place of Swinburne’s argument in the debates about agent causation, and uncover reasons to be sceptical about the claims that substance causation is a genuine alternative to event causation, and that it helps to comprehend the specifics of the causation involved in free agency. I also advance (...)
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  16. Vacuum Genesis oraz spontaniczne powstanie wszechświata z niczego a klasyczna koncepcja przyczynowości oraz stworzenia ex nihilo.Mariusz Tabaczek - 2019 - Scientia et Fides 7 (1):127-162.
    Vacuum Genesis and Spontaneous Emergence of the Universe from Nothing in Reference to the Classical Notion of Causality and Creation ex nihilo The article discousses philosophical and theological reflections inspired by the cosmological model of the origin of the universe from quantum vacuum through quantum tunneling and the model presented by Hartle and Hawking. In the context of the thesis about the possibility of cosmogenesis ex nihilo without the need of God the creator, the question is being raised concerning the (...)
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  17. What Laws? Which Past?: Meillassoux’s Hyper-Chaos and the Epistemological Limitations of Retro-Causation.Michael J. Ardoline - 2018 - Open Philosophy 1 (1):235-244.
    The question of the metaphysical status of the laws of physics has received increased attention in recent years. Perhaps most well-known among this work are David Lewis’s Humean supervenience and Nancy Cartwright’s dispositionalism, both of which reject the classical conception of the laws of physics as necessary and real independent of the objects they govern, arguing instead that what we call laws are shorthand for the regularities of local states of affairs or the dispositions of objects. The properties of necessity (...)
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  18. Dispositionalism and the Metaphysics of Science.Travis Dumsday - 2018 - New York: Cambridge University Press.
    Dispositionalism is the view that causal powers are among the irreducible properties of nature. It has long been among the core competing positions in the metaphysics of laws, but its potential implications for other key debates within metaphysics and the philosophy of science have remained under-explored. Travis Dumsday fills this major gap in the literature by establishing new connections between dispositionalism and such topics as substance ontology, ontic structural realism, material composition, emergentism, natural-kind essentialism, perdurantism, time travel, and spacetime substantivalism. (...)
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  19. Kausalität und Naturgesetze bei Hume und Kant.Wiebke Henning - 2018 - Dissertation, Ruhr-Universität Bochum
    In der Dissertation "Kausalität und Naturgesetze bei Hume und Kant" wird die These vertreten, dass sich in der Werken Kants vielfältige Antworten auf den Skeptizismus David Humes finden lassen. Kants Position zu Naturgesetzen und Kausalität wird insbesondere anhand seiner Theorien zu besonderen Naturgesetzen in der Kritik der reinen Vernunft, den Prolegomena, den Metaphysischen Anfangsgründen der Naturwissenschaft und in der Kritik der Urteilskraft untersucht. Geleitet wird die Untersuchung von der Frage, wie empirische Gesetze in Kants Philosophie gerechtfertigt werden. In diesem Zusammenhang (...)
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  20. Mechanisms, counterfactuals and laws.Stavros Ioannidis & Stathis Psillos - 2018 - In Stuart Glennan & Phyllis Illari (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Mechanisms and Mechanical Philosophy. Routledge. pp. 144-156.
    In this chapter we examine the relation between mechanisms and laws/counterfactuals by revisiting the main notions of mechanism found in the literature. We distinguish between two different conceptions of ‘mechanism’: mechanisms-of underlie or constitute a causal process; mechanisms-for are complex systems that function so as to produce a certain behavior. According to some mechanists, a mechanism fulfills both of these roles simultaneously. The main argument of the chapter is that there is an asymmetrical dependence between both kinds of mechanisms and (...)
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  21. Armstrong’s Theory of Laws and Causation: Putting Things into their Proper Places.S. M. Hassan A. Shirazi - 2018 - Problemos 94:61.
    [full article, abstract in English; abstract in Lithuanian] Armstrong’s theory of laws and causation may be articulated as something like the following, which we may refer to as the received view: “Laws are intrinsic higher-order relations of ensuring between properties. The instantiation of laws is identical with singular causation. This identity is a posteriori.” Opponents and advocates of this view, believe that it may fairly and correctly be attributed to Armstrong. I do not deny it; instead I seek to reconsider (...)
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  22. Kant’s Response to Hume in the Second Analogy: A Critique of Gerd Buchdahl’s and Michael Friedman’s Accounts.Saniye Vatansever - 2018 - Hopos: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science 8 (2):310–346.
    This article presents a critical analysis of two influential readings of Kant’s Second Analogy, namely, Gerd Buchdahl’s “modest reading” and Michael Friedman’s “strong reading.” After pointing out the textual and philosophical problems with each, I advance an alternative reading of the Second Analogy argument. On my reading, the Second Analogy argument proves the existence of necessary and strictly universal causal laws. This, however, does not guarantee that Kant has a solution for the problem of induction. After I explain why the (...)
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  23. Laws: An Invariance-Based Account.James Woodward - 2018 - In Ott & Patton (eds.), Laws of Nature. Oxford University Press.
    This paper defends an invariance-based account of laws of nature: Laws are generalizations that remain invariant under various sorts of changes. Alternatively, laws are generalizations that exhibit a certain kind of independence from background conditions.
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  24. The Certainty, Modality, and Grounding of Newton’s Laws.Zvi Biener & Eric Schliesser - 2017 - The Monist 100 (3):311-325.
    Newton began his Principia with three Axiomata sive Leges Motus. We offer an interpretation of Newton’s dual label and investigate two tensions inherent in his account of laws. The first arises from the juxtaposition of Newton’s confidence in the certainty of his laws and his commitment to their variability and contingency. The second arises because Newton ascribes fundamental status both to the laws and to the bodies and forces they govern. We argue the first is resolvable, but the second is (...)
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  25. A priori causal laws.Darren Bradley - 2017 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 60 (4):358-370.
    Sober and Elgin defend the claim that there are a priori causal laws in biology. Lange and Rosenberg take issue with this on Humean grounds, among others. I will argue that Sober and Elgin don’t go far enough – there are a priori causal laws in many sciences. Furthermore, I will argue that this thesis is compatible with a Humean metaphysics and an empiricist epistemology.
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  26. ‘Natures’ and ‘Laws’: The making of the concept of law of nature – Robert Grosseteste (c. 1168–1253) and Roger Bacon.Yael Kedar & Giora Hon - 2017 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 61:21-31.
  27. Causation, physics, and fit.Christian Loew - 2017 - Synthese 194 (6):1945–1965.
    Our ordinary causal concept seems to fit poorly with how our best physics describes the world. We think of causation as a time-asymmetric dependence relation between relatively local events. Yet fundamental physics describes the world in terms of dynamical laws that are, possible small exceptions aside, time symmetric and that relate global time slices. My goal in this paper is to show why we are successful at using local, time-asymmetric models in causal explanations despite this apparent mismatch with fundamental physics. (...)
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  28. Metaphysics of Science: A Systematic and Historical Introduction.Markus Schrenk - 2017 - London & New York: Routledge.
    Metaphysics and science have a long but troubled relationship. In the twentieth century the Logical Positivists argued metaphysics was irrelevant and that philosophy should be guided by science. However, metaphysics and science attempt to answer many of the same, fundamental questions: What are laws of nature? What is causation? What are natural kinds? -/- In this book, Markus Schrenk examines and explains the central questions and problems in the metaphysics of science. He reviews the development of the field from the (...)
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  29. Emerson’s Metaphysics: A Song of Laws and Causes. [REVIEW]Frederic Tremblay - 2017 - The Pluralist 12 (2):120-124.
    This text is a review of Joseph Urbas's Emerson's Metaphysics: A Song of Laws and Causes (Lexington Books, 2016). In this book, Urbas proposes a reconstruction of the metaphysics of the American poet, essayist, and self-defined philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson. According to Urbas, Emerson has a coherent metaphysics, the fundamental principle of which is the category of causation. Reacting to David Hume, Emerson would have deliberately emphasized causation, connection, relation, tie, link, and so on. Emerson is thus characterized as a (...)
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  30. Explanation, Laws, and Causation.Wei Wang - 2017 - New York, NY: Routledge.
    Scientific explanation, laws of nature and causation are crucial and frontier issues in the philosophy of science. This book studies the complex relationship between the three concepts, aiming to achieve a holistic synthesis about explanation–laws–causation. By reviewing Hempel's Scientific Explanation models and Salmon's three conceptions – the epistemic, modal and ontic conception – the book suggests that laws are essential to explanation and our understanding of laws will help solve the problems of the latter. Concerning the nature of laws, this (...)
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  31. Physical modality, laws, and counterfactuals.James Woodward - 2017 - Synthese 197 (5):1907–1929.
    Standard philosophical accounts attempt to understand physical modality either in terms of special metaphysical entities and relationships or in terms of the organization of non-modal information, as in Best Systems Analysis. This paper defends an alternative to both these approaches in which invariance and various independence conditions play a central role. The methodological importance of separating law-claims from claims about initial and boundary conditions is highlighted.
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  32. Leyes sin causa y causas sin ley en la explicación biológica. [REVIEW]Víctor J. Luque - 2016 - Theoria: Revista de Teoría, Historia y Fundamentos de la Ciencia 31 (2):270-272.
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  33. Wittgenstein on Causation and Induction.Constantine Sandis & Chon Tejedor - 2016 - In Hans‐Johann Glock & John Hyman (eds.), A Companion to Wittgenstein. Chichester, UK: Wiley. pp. 576–586.
    Wittgenstein's earlier treatment of causation and induction remains thought‐provoking and relevant to contemporary debates in the philosophy of science. Wittgenstein's approach to causation and induction in the Tractatus emerges in the context of two separate, but related discussions. A negative discussion that aims to expose a particular understanding of natural necessity as nonsensical, and a more positive discussion concerning the role played by laws in the natural sciences. In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein suggests that internal relations hold between propositions by virtue (...)
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  34. Emerson's Metaphysics: A Song of Laws and Causes.Joseph Urbas - 2016 - Lanham: Lexington Books.
    This book gives the first complete, fully historicized account of Emerson's metaphysics of cause and effect and its foundational position in his philosophy as a whole. Joseph Urbas proposes an intellectual biography of Emerson the metaphysician but also the life-story of a concept synonymous, in the Transcendentalist period, with life itself—the story of the principle at the origin of all being and change.
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  35. Naturgesetze in einer kausalen Welt.Bartels Andreas - 2015 - Münster: mentis.
    How can the laws of nature, that determine how objects behave, be understood as natural objects themselves? The answer that transpires from the analysis of modern theories of the laws of nature is: laws of nature are due to the causal structure of our world. They express the causal efficiacy of fundamental properties of nature. In contrast to rivaling theories, this answer does justice to the fact that laws of nature determine the course of natural events without having to appeal (...)
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  36. Douglas Kutach: Causation and Its Basis in Fundamental Physics. [REVIEW]Thomas Blanchard - 2015 - Philosophy of Science 82 (2):330-333,.
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  37. Laws of nature and causal powers: Two illusory solutions.Sebastián Briceño - 2015 - Alpha (Osorno) 41:73-85.
    La metafísica de la Superveniencia Humeana ha sido atacada por dos alternativas explícitamente anti-Humeanas: el Realismo Nómico y el Esencialismo Disposicional. Cada una de estas alternativas ofrece una explicación ontológica de la actual distribución de instanciaciones de primer orden. Ambas sostienen, contra el Humeano, que esta distribución no es un accidente metafísico. En este artículo argumento que las explicaciones ofrecidas por ellas son ilusorias. -/- The metaphysics of Humean Supervenience has been attacked by two explicitly anti-Humean alternatives: Nomic Realism and (...)
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  38. Locke and the laws of nature.Patrick J. Connolly - 2015 - Philosophical Studies 172 (10):2551-2564.
    Many commentators have argued that Locke understood laws of nature as causally efficacious. On this view the laws are causally responsible for the production of natural phenomena. This paper argues that this interpretation faces serious difficulties. First, I argue that it will be very difficult to specify the ontological status of these laws. Proponents of the view suggest that these laws are divine volitions. But I argue that this will be difficult or impossible to square with Locke’s nominalism. Second, I (...)
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  39. Are social mechanisms the antonym of laws?Amparo Gómez Rodríguez - 2015 - Epistemologia 38 (1):31-46.
    The thesis that in social sciences causal explanations are possible only in terms o mechanisms due to the lack of genuine laws has been increasingly popular among social scientist and philosophers. In this article it is examined whether the explanation by mechanism is necessarily an explanation without laws or, on the contrary, it can involve some kind o laws. To this end it is argued, firstly, that mechanisms are not always the antonym of law insofar as they express propensities and (...)
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  40. Explanatory Asymmetries: Laws of Nature Rehabilitated.Lina Jansson - 2015 - Journal of Philosophy 112 (11):577-599.
    The problem of explanatory non-symmetries provides the strongest reason to abandon the view that laws can figure in explanations without causal underpinnings. I argue that this problem can be overcome. The solution that I propose starts from noticing the importance of conditions of application when laws do explanatory work, and I go on to develop a notion of nomological dependence that can tackle the non-symmetry problem. The strategy is to show how a strong notion of counterfactual dependence as guaranteed by (...)
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  41. Laws of Nature and Causal Necessity.Michael Friedman - 2014 - Kant Studien 105 (4):531-553.
    Name der Zeitschrift: Kant-Studien Jahrgang: 105 Heft: 4 Seiten: 531-553.
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  42. Causal powers as metaphysical grounds for laws or nature.Michael Ghins - 2014 - Epistemologia 37 (2):183-201.
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  43. Kant on causal laws and powers.Tobias Henschen - 2014 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 48:20-29.
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  44. Causação e Física Clássica: existe possibilidade de conciliação?Túlio Roberto Xavier de Aguiar - 2013 - Principia: An International Journal of Epistemology 16 (3):353-364.
    In this work, I analyze our concept of cause in the face of criticism of Bertrand Russell in his article “On the Notion of Cause”. For Russell, there is an estrangement between the notion of cause and mature science of physics. The word cause (and its correlates) would not be used in physics, thus eliminating the main justification of philosophy for his job—the foundation of science. Thus, the various causal notions and the principle of causality should be abandoned by philosophers (...)
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  45. A Relic of a Bygone Age? Causation, Time Symmetry and the Directionality Argument.Matt Farr & Alexander Reutlinger - 2013 - Erkenntnis 78 (2):215-235.
    Bertrand Russell famously argued that causation is not part of the fundamental physical description of the world, describing the notion of cause as “a relic of a bygone age”. This paper assesses one of Russell’s arguments for this conclusion: the ‘Directionality Argument’, which holds that the time symmetry of fundamental physics is inconsistent with the time asymmetry of causation. We claim that the coherence and success of the Directionality Argument crucially depends on the proper interpretation of the ‘ time symmetry’ (...)
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  46. On the Distinction Between Law Schemata and Causal Laws.Jens Harbecke - 2013 - Acta Analytica 28 (4):423-434.
    The paper argues against the widely accepted assumption that the causal laws of (completed) physics, in contrast to those of the special sciences, are essentially strict. This claim played an important role already in debates about the anomalousness of the mental, and it currently experiences a renaissance in various discussions about mental causation, projectability of special science laws, and the nature of physical laws. By illustrating the distinction with some paradigmatic physical laws, the paper demonstrates that only law schemata are (...)
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  47. Tooley’s account of the necessary connection between law and regularity.Tyler Hildebrand - 2013 - Philosophical Studies 166 (1):33-43.
    Fred Dretske, Michael Tooley, and David Armstrong accept a theory of governing laws of nature according to which laws are atomic states of affairs that necessitate corresponding natural regularities. Some philosophers object to the Dretske/Tooley/Armstrong theory on the grounds that there is no illuminating account of the necessary connection between governing law and natural regularity. In response, Michael Tooley has provided a reductive account of this necessary connection in his book Causation (1987). In this essay, I discuss an improved version (...)
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  48. Kausalität, Determinismus und Physik Schlicks frühe Überlegungen zum Kausalbegriff im Lichte der zeitgenössischen Diskussion.Andreas Hüttemann - 2013 - Schlickiana 6:323-336.
    Moritz Schlick dealt with the question of causality in various places, including in his Allgemeine Erkenntnislehre - but especially in two essays that appeared in the journal Die Naturwissenschaften in 1920 and 1931. I will deal here with the essay "Naturphilosophische Betrachtungen über das Kausalprinzip" from 1920. First, in the first section, I will present the historical context and thus the problems to which Schlick was responding. In the second and third sections, I will reconstruct and discuss Schlick's proposed solutions (...)
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  49. The Interventionist Account of Causation and Non-causal Association Laws.Max Kistler - 2013 - Erkenntnis 78 (1):1-20.
    The key idea of the interventionist account of causation is that a variable A causes a variable B if and only if B would change if A were manipulated in the appropriate way. This paper raises two problems for Woodward's (2003) version of interventionism. The first is that the conditions it imposes are not sufficient for causation, because these conditions are also satisfied by non-causal relations of nomological dependence expressed in association laws. Such laws ground a relation of mutual manipulability (...)
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  50. Causation and Its Basis in Fundamental Physics.Douglas Kutach - 2013 - New York: Oxford University Press.
    I provide a comprehensive metaphysics of causation based on the idea that fundamentally things are governed by the laws of physics, and that derivatively difference-making can be assessed in terms of what fundamental laws of physics imply for hypothesized events. Highlights include a general philosophical methodology, the fundamental/derivative distinction, and my mature account of causal asymmetry.
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