Abstract
Our concept of actual causation plays a deep, ever-present role in our experiences. I first argue that traditional philosophical methods for understanding this concept are unlikely to be successful. I contend that we should instead use functional analyses and an understanding of the cognitive bases of causal cognition to gain insight into the concept of actual causation. I additionally provide initial, programmatic steps towards carrying out such analyses. The characterization of the concept of actual causation that results is quite different from many standard views: it is graded, context-sensitive, and extrinsic.
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Notes
Thus, although I will use cognitive data, I do not equate the concept of actual causation in our cognition and experience with whatever determines the attributions of the “folk” (in contrast with the suggestion of Hitchcock 2007).
Many people call this process ‘conceptual analysis.’ I avoid that term simply in order to sidestep various debates about the proper methodology and exact power of conceptual analysis.
These two approaches are not intended to be exhaustive. Another strategy would be to analyze the meanings of causal terms in everyday language (i.e., not simply whether people would assent to apply them in particular cases). This strategy underlies the “force dynamics”-based model of causal language advocated by Talmy (1988), Wolff (2007) and Wolff and Song (2003). That account appears to share substantial overlap with the account advocated here, particularly my focus on causal perception. A unification or reconciliation of causal perception and force dynamics-based thought is an open issue at the current time (though see White 2006, 2009).
Of course, explanations can serve other functions as well, including having some intrinsic value.
One might wonder whether causal knowledge is required for these purposes, since learned, non-causal associations (e.g., from classical or instrumental conditioning) have sometimes been suggested to be sufficient (e.g., Shanks 1995). There is, however, no known, purely associative (i.e., non-causal) learning process that can account for people’s ability to use prior observations (not actions) to predict the outcomes of their later actions (as in Meder et al. 2010). The full range of human abilities of prediction, explanation, and control do seem to require truly causal knowledge.
We can also look to the related (though of course, not identical) case of type-level causation. There are various experiments showing that confidence in a causal relation (i.e., the degree of belief) is not identical with causal strength judgments (e.g., Collins and Shanks 2006), and so (ii) cannot explain the empirical data. Thus, to the extent that one thinks that the concepts of type-level and actual causation are related, one should expect that actual causation is similarly graded.
If there are sufficiently many causes in the world (or sufficiently many ways to vary particular causes), then we can potentially even move from “raw” comparative judgments to full cardinality information, analogously to moving from comparative bet acceptances to cardinal utilities.
There is debate about whether the laws of nature or counterfactuals are intrinsic or extrinsic. For both Menzies and myself, that issue is irrelevant to the question of whether causation is intrinsic or extrinsic.
Again, we see the limits of functional analyses: the application of the concept of actual causation must “look” extrinsic, but we cannot draw the more specific conclusion that the content of the concept must be of an extrinsic relation.
One might object that we can seemingly directly perceive causation in certain cases (e.g., a collision causing a block to move). The next section focuses on this causal perception.
This sort of sensitivity is part of a broader issue of how “causal” variables arise in cognition, including the scope and level of the variables. See Woodward (2006) for an extended discussion.
Hitchcock and Knobe (2009) is also framed in terms of the concept of actual causation and the function of resulting judgments, but their paper seems to have the structure: “the concept of causation does not have the content to be used for successful prediction and planning, so it must have some other function.” In contrast, I am arguing that it clearly is used for prediction and planning, so its content must be different from what we (qua philosophers) have presupposed.
These claims are related, but have no logical dependence. One could believe (a) without (b) by endorsing a kind of relativism. One could endorse (b) without (a) by arguing that it is a contingent feature of causal epistemology (i.e., contingently, an omniscient, rational agent would learn all and only true causal facts), rather than a definitional claim about the nature of causation.
And these two together imply that rational causal beliefs should, when possible, be structured as a directed acyclic graph whose parametric component obeys the Markov assumption and is consistent with mechanism information (Williamson 2005).
Williamson’s focus seems to be driven by his need for an objective basis for causal claims (which most philosophers believe cannot come from descriptive considerations of humans), which itself arises partly because he denies that there is any causation “out there.”.
For example, causal graphical models have great difficulty characterizing causal relations with “thick” spatiotemporal characteristics (e.g., the ability to intervene on the underlying mechanism at arbitrary spacetime points). The present functional analysis has no such restriction. Similarly, there are presently no formal models of causal perception, which is the focus of the next section.
There is a large philosophical literature about whether perception is conceptualized, but those debates are almost exclusively about whether all perception is necessarily conceptualized. All I require is the relatively uncontroversial claim that this particular type of perception (in normally functioning humans of at least roughly 2 years of age) is conceptualized.
In fact, some authors seem to have in mind the view that causal perception is the only source of token-level or singular causal judgments. (Something like this idea is expressed in Armstrong 2004, but the general sentiment occurs elsewhere.) I reject this idea for multiple reasons, but it does provide further reason to focus on causal perception.
Interestingly, it turns out that the phenomenological experience of launching and causation is maximal when there is a slight delay before movement onset (Schlottmann and Anderson 1993).
In fact, the orthogonality of these two types of changes was used to help tease apart causal inference and causal perception (Schlottmann and Shanks 1992).
A fully Kantian analysis could presumably explore the concept of actual causation without appeal to any particular empirical facts about us or the world.
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Acknowledgments
Initial versions of these ideas were presented at the 2010 Konstanz workshop on actual causation. Many thanks to the participants at that workshop—particularly Ned Hall, Chris Hitchcock, and Laurie Paul—for their helpful comments, questions, and criticisms. Three anonymous referees and two editors provided valuable feedback on an earlier version of this paper. Thanks also to Clark Glymour for discussions about the issues in Sect. 2. The author was partially supported by a James S. McDonnell Foundation Scholar Award.
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Danks, D. Functions and Cognitive Bases for the Concept of Actual Causation. Erkenn 78 (Suppl 1), 111–128 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-013-9439-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-013-9439-2