Abstract

Peter Alexander: It is presumably admitted that laws, whether causal or not, are universal in form; they are appropriately stated in universal categoricals or unrestricted hypotheticals. I assume that this is not at issue in the question set. I take our question to be this: given that causal laws are universal statements, can they be said to be about, to apply to, to hold for, individual things? Peter Downing: Mr. Alexander maintains that there are 'irreducibly singular' causal statements, and that from this it follows that causal laws need not be purely general. The view that there are irreducibly singular causal statements appears to commit Alexander to rejecting two theses: (i) that singular causal statements are analysable into statements containing specific generalizations, [...] (ii) That singular causal statements are analysable into statements containing incompletely specified generalizations [...]. Thesis (i) is, I think, clearly false. [...] Thesis (ii), however, is not easily refuted.