Causation and preemption
| Abstract | Causation is a deeply intuitive and familiar relation, gripped powerfully by common sense. Or so it seems. But as is typical in philosophy, deep intuitive familiarity has not led to any philosophical account of causation that is at once clean, precise, and widely agreed upon. Not for lack of trying: the last 30 years or so have seen dozens of attempts to provide such an account, and the pace of development is, if anything, accelerating. (See Collins, Hall and Paul 2003a for a comprehensive sampling of the latest work.) It is safe to say that none has yet succeeded. It is also safe to say that the effort put into their development has yielded a wealth of insights into causation. And it is, arguably, from the study of causal preemption—cases that feature multiple competing candidates for the title of “cause” of some given effect—that the greatest such wealth has flowed. These cases come in a number of varieties: so-called early and late preemption, symmetric overdetermination, and trumping preemption. Collectively, they place extremely severe constraints on any philosophical account of causation that can successfully handle them. One of the lessons they have to teach, then, is a lesson about the form that a successful analysis of causation must have. There is a deeper lesson, a lesson about the nature of causation itself, or if you like, about the workings of our causal concept. It emerges from close study of the struggles that extant accounts face in trying to provide even remotely attractive treatments of causal preemption. It is this: There appears to be a significant and perhaps intractable tension between one strand in our thinking about causation—a strand that emphasizes the need for causes to be connected to their effects via intervening processes with the right intrinsic character—and another—one that emphasizes the claim that effects in some sense depend on their causes. By the end of this essay, this tension will be vividly apparent.. | |||||||||
| 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: 5,701 |
| External links |
  Try with proxy. |
| Through your library | Only published papers are available at libraries |
Similar books and articlesJonardon Ganeri, Paul Noordhof & Murali Ramachandran (1996). Counterfactuals and Preemptive Causation. Analysis 56 (4):219–225.
I. Kvart (2001). Lewis's 'Causation as Influence'. Australasian Journal of Philosophy 79 (3):409 – 421.
L. A. Paul (1998). Problems with Late Preemption. Analysis 58 (1):48–53.
Tomasz Bigaj (2012). Causation Without Influence. Erkenntnis 76 (1):1-22.
Gunnar Björnsson (2007). How Effects Depend on Their Causes, Why Causal Transitivity Fails, and Why We Care About Causation. Philosophical Studies 133 (3):349 - 390.
Paul Noordhof (1999). Probabilistic Causation, Preemption and Counterfactuals. Mind 108 (429):95-125.
Michael Strevens (2007). Mackie Remixed. In J. K. Campbell, M. O'Rourke & H. S. Silverstein (eds.), Causation and Explanation. MIT Press.
Jonathan Schaffer (2000). Trumping Preemption. Journal of Philosophy 97 (4):165-181.
Analytics
Monthly downloads |
Added to index2009-01-28Total downloads48 ( #22,402 of 549,090 )Recent downloads (6 months)2 ( #37,333 of 549,090 )How can I increase my downloads? |
My notes
Discussion
