Abstract
There is a tradition, tracing back to Kant, of recasting metaphysical questions as questions about the utility of a conceptual scheme, linguistic framework, or methodological rule for achieving some particular end. Following in this tradition, I propose a ‘means-ends metaphysics’, in which one rigorously demonstrates the suitability of some conceptual framework for achieving a specified goal. I illustrate this approach using a debate about the nature of events. Specifically, the question is whether the time at which an event occurs is an essential property of that event. I argue that this question is naturally transformed into a question about the methodology of causal modeling. In this new framework, the question concerns what kind of variables to use to represent the effects of potential interventions on a system. This question has a demonstrably correct answer, which sheds new light on the original question.
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Notes
Here I lean heavily on the historical work of Michael Friedman. See for example, the short overview in Friedman (2001, Chaps. I and II).
The status of the ‘soul’, or mind in the rationalist period is somewhat tricky. For Aristotle, the soul was what animated a living being (‘animation’ being etymologically related to ‘anima’), and was very much a part of the natural world. The traditional understanding of Descartes has him rejecting this view, attributing the soul to human beings only, and moving it from the realm of natural philosophy to metaphysics. The truth, however, is considerably more complicated, and the status of the mind as an object of inquiry remained in flux throughout the Seventeenth Century. See, e.g. Manning (forthcoming) for further discussion.
See Laurie Paul’s contribution to this volume for a contemporary version of this picture of metaphysics.
While the straight rule is sufficient for achieving the goal of convergence to the correct probability (if it exists), it is not necessary, as a number of commentators have pointed out.
This view is also sometimes attributed to Kim (1973a). Kim takes the time at which an event occurs to be a distinguishing feature of that event. But it seems that Kim’s purpose is to distinguish an event from other events that actually occur. For example, if my doorbell rings at noon, and then again at one o’clock, the two ringings are distinguished by their time of occurrence. Kim does not explicitly propose that the time at which an event occurs should also serve to distinguish it from merely possible events. So it is unclear whether he intends that the time at which an event occurs is an essential property of that event.
Lewis (1973) offers this as an account of causal dependence, which is sufficient, but not necessary for causation.
‘Immediacy’ here is relative to the set of variables chosen, rather than absolute.
Lewis is explicitly neutral on whether different alterations of an event constitute different events, or different ways in which the very same event could occur.
My backyard grill is connected to the main gas line of the house, rather than having a separate gas supply.
The gas supply to my house is equipped with a seismic shut-off valve, which closes the gas line if there is an earthquake, or if the plumber bangs on the pipes too hard.
Halpern and Pearl (2005) model Bennett’s example using just this kind of variable.
This is a bit tricky. If we want to distinguish between the lightning strikes in April and those in May, and have our model reflect that the latter caused the fire while the former did not, then we cannot get by with the first strategy for modeling the forest fire. The second strategy, however, will not cause us problems even in this case. For example, I don’t think the use of the second strategy in Halpern and Pearl (2005) undermines their analysis of the example.
This is a variant of an example used in Halpern and Hitchcock (2010).
I would like to thank an anonymous referee for helping me to clarify the following discussion.
In fact it is worse. As Lewis (1976) points out, in the case of the grandfather paradox there is a consistent solution: one where the time traveler fails to kill her grandfather.
See e.g. Hitchcock (2001) for discussion of some of the reasons for this rule.
This is not necessarily true. A world very different from ours might have simultaneous causation, and hence simultaneous prevention as well. In such a world, we might be able to sensibly say that the gas knob’s being set to high prevents it from being set to low at the very same time. And I think that a case can be made that distant correlation phenomena of the sort one finds in quantum mechanics can involve non-causal exclusion relations between spatiotemporally separated events.
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Acknowledgments
For comments and discussion, I’d like to thank David Baker, Michael Friedman, Ronald Giere, Ned Hall, Benj Hellie, Boris Kment, Laurie Paul, Peter van Inwagen, Jessica Wilson, participants at the workshop on Scientific Philosophy at the University of Tilburg and the Carolina Metaphysics Workshop, and an anonymous referee.
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Hitchcock, C. Events and times: a case study in means-ends metaphysics. Philos Stud 160, 79–96 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-012-9909-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-012-9909-4