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- Stathos Psillos, What is Causation?(.When we philosophers think about causation we are primarily interested in what causation is—what exactly is the relation between cause and effect? Or, more or less equivalently, how and in virtue of what is the cause connected to the effect? But we are also interested in an epistemic issue, viz., the possibility of causal knowledge: how, if at all, can causal knowledge be obtained? The two issues are, of course, conceptually distinct—but to many thinkers, there is a connection between them. A metaphysical account of causation would be useless if it did not make, at least in principle, causal knowledge possible. Conversely, many philosophers, mostly of an empiricist persuasion, have taken the possibility of causal knowledge to act as a constraint on the metaphysics of causation: no feature that cannot in principle become the object of knowledge can be attributed to causation.In my reading list | Discuss this article | Edit | Categorize |My bibliography
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Singularists about causation often claim that we can have experiences as of causation. This paper argues that regularity theorists need not deny that claim; hence the possibility of causal experience is no objection to regularity theories of causation. The fact that, according to a regularity theorist, causal experience requires background theory does not provide grounds for denying that it is genuine experience. The regularity theorist need not even deny that non-inferential perceptual knowledge of causation is possible, despite the fact that (...)
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| | Other links: blackwell-synergy.com | Scholar | More.. This is a clear and original account of causation based firmly in contemporary science. Dowe discusses in a systematic way an original, positive account of causation: the conserved quantities account of causal processes which he has been developing over the last ten years. The book describes causal processes and interactions in terms of conserved quantities: a causal process is the worldline of an object which possesses a conserved quantity, and a causal interaction involves the exchange of conserved quantities. Further, things (...)
Negative causation occurs when an absence serves as cause, effect, or causal intermediary. Negative causation is genuine causation, or so I shall argue. It involves no physical connection between cause and effect. Thus causes need not be physically connected to their effects.
The possibility of apparently negative causation has been discussed in a number of recent works on causation, but the discussion has suffered from beingscattered. In this paper, the problem of apparently negative causation and its attemptedsolutions are examined in more detail. I discuss and discard three attempts that have beensuggested in the literature. My conclusion is negative: Negative causation shows that thetraditional cause & effect view is inadequate. A more unified causal perspective is needed.
Mackie, J. L. Causes and conditions.--Taylor, R. The metaphysics of causation.--Scriven, M. Defects of the necessary condition analysis of causation.--Kim, J. Causes and events: Mackie on causation.--Anscombe, G. E. M. Causality and determination.--Davidson, D. Causal relations.--Wright, G. H. von. On the logic and epistemology of the causal relation.--Ducasse, C. J. On the nature and the observability of the causal relation.--Sellars, W. S. Counterfactuals.--Chisholm, R. M. Law statements and counterfactual inference.--Rescher, N. Belief-contravening suppositions and the problem of contrary-to-fact conditionals.--Stalnaker, R. A (...)
Abstract: It is generally accepted that the most serious threat to the possibility of mental causation is posed by the causal self-sufficiency of physical causal processes. I argue, however, that this feature of the world, which I articulate in principle I call Completeness, in fact poses no genuine threat to mental causation. Some find Completeness threatening to mental causation because they confuse it with a stronger principle, which I call Closure. Others do not simply conflate Completeness and Closure, but (...)
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| | Other links: springerlink.com ingentaconnect.com | Scholar | More.. Sydney Shoemaker has attempted to save mental causation by a new account of realization. As Brian McLaughlin argues convincingly, the account has to face two major problems. First, realization does not guarantee entailment. So even if mental properties are realized by physical properties, they need not be entailed by them. This is the first, rather general metaphysical problem. A second problem, which relates more directly to mental causation is that Shoemaker must appeal to some kind of proportionality as a constraint (...)
I argue (1) that it is not philosophically significant whether causation is linguistically represented by a predicate or by a sentence connective; (2) that there is no philosophically significant distinction between event- and states-of-affairs-causation; (3) that there is indeed a philosophically significant distinction between agent- and event-causation, and that event-causation must be regarded as an analog of agent-causation. Developing this point, I argue that event-causation's being in the image of agent-causation requires, mainly, (a) that the cause is temporally prior to (...)
