Online research in philosophy

Abstract   In this paper I offer an anti-Humean interpretation of the causal interactions in somatic medicine. I focus on life-threatening pathological states and show how Nancy Cartwright’s capacities can offer a plausible epistemology for medical processes and the singular causal claims advanced in medical diagnoses. I argue that the capacities manifested in the emergence of symptoms and signs could be tracked down if healthy organisms are construed as nomological machines and suggest that the causal reasoning from current medical practice bears a tacit adherence to anti-Humean assumptions. Content Type Journal Article Pages 1-28 DOI 10.1007/s12136-011-0141-1 Authors Stefan Dragulinescu, Drumul Taberei 20, Bucharest, Romania Journal Acta Analytica Online ISSN 1874-6349 Print ISSN 0353-5150.

In this paper I argue against Nancy Cartwright’s claim that we ought to abandon what she calls “fundamentalism” about the laws of nature and adopt instead her “dappled world” hypothesis. According to Cartwright we ought to abandon the notion that fundamental laws (even potentially) apply universally, instead we should consider the law-like statements of science to apply in highly qualified ways within narrow, non-overlapping and ontologically diverse domains, including the laws of fundamental physics. For Cartwright, “laws” are just locally applicable refinements of a more open-ended concept of capacities. By providing a critique of the dappled world approach’s central notion of open ended capacities and substituting this concept with an account of properties drawn from recent writing on the subject of structural realism I show that a form of fundamentalism is viable. I proceed from this conclusion to show that this form of fundamentalism provides a superior reading of case studies, such as the effective field theory program (EFT) in quantum field theory, than the “dappled world” view. The case study of the EFT program demonstrates that ontological variability between theoretical domains can be accounted for without altogether abandoning fundamentalism or adopting Cartwright’s more implausible theses.

Nancy Cartwright believes that we live in a Dappled World– a world in which theories, principles, and methods applicable in one domain may be inapplicable in others; in which there are no universal principles. One of the targets of Cartwright’s arguments for this conclusion is the Causal Markov condition, a condition which has been proposed as a universal condition on causal structures.1 The Causal Markov condition, Cartwright argues, is applicable only in a limited domain of special cases, and thus cannot be used as a universal principle in causal discovery. I have no dispute with any of these claims here. Rather, I wish to argue for a very limited thesis: that the Causal Markov condition is applicable in the specific domain of microscopic quantum mechanical systems; further, that the condition can fruitfully be applied to the much discussed EPR setup. This is perhaps a surprising conclusion, for it is precisely in this domain that Cartwright’s arguments against the Causal Markov condition have been considered to be the most successful.

I argue that Nancy Cartwright's largely methodological arguments for capacities and against Hume's regularity account of causation are only partially successful. They are especially problematic in establishing the primacy of singular causation and the reality of mixed-dual capacities. Therefore, her arguments need to be supported by ontological ones, and I propose the propensity interpretation of causal probabilities as a natural way of doing this.

In a famous paper in Noûs in 1979, John Perry points out that action depends on indexical beliefs. In addition to “third-person” information about her environment, an agent need “first-person” information about where, when and who she is. This conclusion is widely interpreted as a reason for thinking that tensed claims cannot be translated without loss into untensed language; but not as a reason for realism about tensed facts. In another famous paper in the same volume of Noûs, Nancy Cartwright argues that action requires that agents represent their world in causal terms, rather than merely probabilistic terms: for, Cartwright argues, there’s a distinction between effective and ineffective strategies, that otherwise goes missing. This is widely taken as a reason for thinking that causal claims cannot be translated without loss into merely probabilistic claims; and also – in contrast to Perry’s case – widely regarded as a reason for realism about causation. In this paper I ask whether the latter conclusion is compulsory, or whether, as in Perry’s case, the need for causal beliefs might merely reflect some “situated” aspect of a decision-maker’s perspective.

In this paper I defend fundamental physical laws from the arguments mounted by Nancy Cartwright in her (1999) book The Dappled World (and other publications). I argue, positively, that we have a good deal of evidence for mathematical laws—not just causal capacities—underlying many natural phenomena. I also argue, negatively, that Cartwright's main arguments unfairly demand that a fundamentalist be a strong reductionist.

Philosophers of mind tend to take it for granted that causal relations are part of the mind-independent, objective fabric of the physical world. In fact, their status has been hotly contested since Russell famously observed that the closest thing to causal relations in physics are timesymmetric dynamical laws relating global time slices of world-history. 1 These bear a distant relationship to the local, asymmetric relations that form the core of the folk notion of cause. Nancy Cartwright, in an influential response, agreed about the absence of causal relations from physics, but argued that Russell’s position was not viable because agents choosing among potential actions need specifically causal information to distinguish effective from ineffective strategies for bringing about ends. 2 Causal beliefs play an ineliminable role in practical deliberation In recent years, there has been a great deal of progress in understanding the relationship between causal concepts and the dynamical laws that appear in advanced physics, together with a proliferation of new tools for representing and discovering causal structure.

Nancy Cartwright’s most recent book, Hunting Causes and Using Them: Approaches to Philosophy and Economics (hereafter, HCUT), is a welcome and provocative addition to the current literature on causation. In HCUT, Cartwright further develops themes from her earlier work, especially Nature’s Capacities and their Measurement (1989) and The Dappled World (1999). One theme is that methodological issues having to with inferring and applying claims about cause and effect must be considered in tandem with metaphysical questions about what causation is. And with regard to the latter issue, Cartwright insists that causation is not just one kind of thing but is instead a general category for various types of processes that often differ in important ways. From these two themes, it naturally follows that one should be skeptical that there is any method of causal inference that is applicable in all cases. Moreover, for any method, one ought to be very clear about the types of causal systems for which it is suited and, of equal importance, those for which it is not. Given Cartwright’s approach, such investigations will require careful attention to domain specific detail about the nature of the causal processes of interest. Cartwright pursues these ideas in the context of critical examinations of current approaches to causation, including Bayes nets and several approaches proposed by econometricians. I am quite sympathetic to Cartwright’s overall perspective on causation, but I take issue with some of her characterizations of particular approaches and several of her specific claims about their limitations. I focus on Cartwright’s claims concerning methods of causal inference that rely on Bayes nets, which among the methods she discusses is the one I know best. First, I argue that Cartwright’s discussion of this topic 1 is problematic insofar as it does not pay adequate attention to the distinct projects that might be pursued within a Bayes nets approach to causation..

This paper proposes a revision of our understanding of causation that is designed to address what Hartry Field has suggested is the central problem in the metaphysics of causation today: reconciling Bertrand Russell’s arguments that the concept of causation can play no role in the advanced sciences with Nancy Cartwright’s arguments that causal concepts are essential to a scientific understanding of the world. The paper shows that Russell’s main argument is, ironically, very similar to an argument that Cartwright has put forward against the truth of universal laws of nature. The paper uses this insight to develop an account of causation that does justice to traditional views yet avoids the arguments of Russell.