Rescued from the rubbish Bin: Lewis on causation
Philosophy of Science 71 (5):1107-1114 (2004)
| Abstract | Lewis's work on causation was governed by a familiar methodological approach: the aim was to come up with an account of causation that would recover, in as elegant a fashion as possible, all of our firm “pre‐theoretic” intuitions about hypothetical cases. That methodology faces an obvious challenge, in that it is not clear why anyone not interested in the semantics of the English word “cause” should care about its results. Better to take a different approach, one which treats our intuitions about cases merely as guides in the construction of a causal concept or concepts that will serve some useful theoretical purpose. I sketch one central such purpose, suggesting, first, that an account of causation that, like Lewis's, gives a central role to counterfactuals is well‐suited to fulfill it, and, second, that the most famous pre‐emption‐based counterexamples to a counterfactual account yield an important constraint on a successful account. | |||||||||
| Keywords | No keywords specified (fix it) | |||||||||
| Categories | ||||||||||
| Options |
|
|||||||||
Download options| PhilPapers Archive |
Upload a copy of this paper Check publisher's policy on self-archival Papers currently archived: 5,875 |
| External links |
 |
| Through your library | Configure |
Similar books and articlesLaura W. Ekstrom (1998). Freedom, Causation, and the Consequence Argument. Synthese 115 (3):333-54.
Robert Northcott (2009). On Lewis, Schaffer and the Non-Reductive Evaluation of Counterfactuals. Theoria 75 (4):336-343.
Charles B. Cross (2008). Antecedent-Relative Comparative World Similarity. Journal of Philosophical Logic 37 (2):101-120.
Tomasz Bigaj (2012). Causation Without Influence. Erkenntnis 76 (1):1-22.
Joseph A. Baltimore (2011). Lewis' Modal Realism and Absence Causation. Metaphysica 12 (2):117-124.
Peter Menzies (2004). Difference-Making in Context. In J. Collins, N. Hall & L. Paul (eds.), Causation and Counterfactuals. Mit Press.
Murali Ramachandran (1997). A Counterfactual Analysis of Causation. Mind 106 (422):263-277.
Cei Maslen (2004). Degrees of Influence and the Problem of Pre-Emption. Australasian Journal of Philosophy 82 (4):577 – 594.
Peter Menzies (1989). Probabilistic Causation and Causal Processes: A Critique of Lewis. Philosophy of Science 56 (4):642-663.
Analytics
Monthly downloads |
Added to index2009-01-28Total downloads77 ( #10,669 of 556,837 )Recent downloads (6 months)2 ( #39,010 of 556,837 )How can I increase my downloads? |
My notes
Discussion
