What is Causation?(

Abstract

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

Links

PhilArchive



    Upload a copy of this work     Papers currently archived: 90,221

External links

  • This entry has no external links. Add one.
Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

  • Only published works are available at libraries.

Similar books and articles

Seeing causing.Helen Beebee - 2003 - Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 103 (3):257-280.
Against the Contrastive Account of Singular Causation.Asbjørn Steglich-Petersen - 2012 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 63 (1):115-143.
Mechanisms and downward causation.Max Kistler - 2009 - Philosophical Psychology 22 (5):595-609.
Mental causation in a physical world.Eric Marcus - 2005 - Philosophical Studies 122 (1):27-50.

Analytics

Added to PP
2009-01-28

Downloads
128 (#131,006)

6 months
12 (#122,242)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Citations of this work

No citations found.

Add more citations

References found in this work

No references found.

Add more references