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The Nature of Causation: A Singularist Account

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Michael Tooley
Michael Tooley*
Affiliation:
The Australian National University, Canberra, ACT 2601, Australia
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Extract

Is a singularist conception of causation coherent? That is to say, is it possible for two events to be causally related, without that relationship being an instance of some causal law, either basic or derived, and either probabilistic or non-probabilistic? Since the time of Hume, the overwhelmingly dominant philosophical view has been that such a conception of causation is not coherent.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy Supplementary Volume , Volume 16: Canadian Philosophers — Celebrating Twenty Years of the Canadian Journal of Philosophy , 1990 , pp. 271 - 322
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1990

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References

1 P.A. French, T.E. Uehling and H.K. Wettstein, eds., ‘Laws and Causal Relations’ in Midwest Studies in Philosophy 9 (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press 1984), 93-112, and Causation — A Realist Approach (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1988), ch. 6

2 Causation, ch. 8

3 Fred I. Dretske, ‘Laws of Nature,’ Philosophy of Science 44 (1977); David M. Armstrong, What is a Law of Nature? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1983), esp. ch 1-5; and my own discussions in ‘The Nature of Laws’ (Canadian Journal of Philosophy 7, 4 [1977] 667-98), and in Causation, section 2.1.1

4 For a more detailed discussion, see Causation, 268-74.

5 The only restriction upon properties here is that they must not involve particulars.

6 ‘Laws and Causal Relations,’ 99-107

7 Some axiomatic formulations of Newtonian spacetime involve the postulate of a generalized betweenness relation that, rather than being restricted to locations at a given time, can hold between spacetime points belonging to different temporal slices. See, for example, Hartry Field's Science Without Numbers (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1980), 52-3. But the idea that such a spatiotemporal relation can be basic is, I believe, very dubious.

8 G. E. M. Anscombe, ‘Causality and Determination,’ Causation and Conditionals, E. Sosa, ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1975), 63-81. See p. 81.

9 David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, Part 2, Section 14, and An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding, section 7

10 ‘Causality and Determination,’ 67-9

11 C.J. Ducasse, ‘The Nature and the Observability of the Causal Relation,’ Journal of Philosophy 23 (1926), 57-67, and reprinted in Causation and Conditionals, 114-25. See p. 116.

12 Ibid., 122. Ducasse thought he could get around this difficulty, but as Ernest Sosa and others have shown, Ducasse's response is unsatisfactory. See, for example, Sosa's discussion in the introduction to Causation and Conditionals, 8-10.

13 Wesley Salmon, ‘Theoretical Explanation,’ in Explanation, S. Korner, ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1975), 118-43. See pp. 128ff.

14 A more extended discussion can be found in Causation, 235-6.

15 Causation, esp. 247-50

16 I am indebted to David Armstrong for pointing out the possibility of quantized causal relations.

17 Compare David Lewis's ‘The Paradoxes of Time Travel,’ American Philosophical Quarterly 13 (1976) 145-52.

18 Adolf Grünbaum, ‘Carnap's Views on the Foundations of Geometry,’ in The Philosophy of Rudolf Carnap, Paul A. Schilpp, ed. (La Salle, IL: Open Court 1963), 599-684. See pp. 614-15.

19 See, for example, Antony Flew, ‘Can an Effect Precede its Cause?,’ Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volume 28 (1954) 45-62; Max Black, ‘Why Cannot an Effect Precede its Cause?,’ Analysis 16 (1955-6) 49-58; David Pears, ‘The Priority of Causes,’ Analysis 17 (1956-7) 54-63; Richard Swinburne, Space and Time (London: Macmillan 1968), 109; D.H. Mellor, Real Time (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1981), chapter 9.

20 See, for example, my discussion in Causation, 234-5.

21 The relevant proofs are set out in Causation, 277-80 and 325-35.

22 The postulate in question is the second of the six postulates set out on p. 262 of Causation.

23 Causation, chapter 7

24 The intuitive idea set out in the previous section applies to both probabilistic and non-probabilistic causal laws. For my purposes here, however, it will suffice to consider only the case of non-probabilistic causal laws. The extension to the case of probabilistic laws is straightforward, and is discussed in Causation, 291-6.

25 Compare the slightly different notation proposed by Jaegwon Kim in his article, ‘Causes and Events: Mackie on Causation,’ Journal of Philosophy 68 (1971) 426-41, and reprinted in Sosa, 48-62: ‘we shall use the notation “[x,P,t]” to refer to the event of x's exemplifying property Pat time t’ (Sosa, 60).

26 Causation, 256-62

27 The problems that confront reductionist accounts of the direction of causation are discussed at length in Causation, especially in chapter 7, and the first section of chapter 8.

28 F.P. Ramsey, Theories,’ The Foundations of Mathematics, R.B. Braithwaite, ed. (Paterson, NJ: Littlefield, Adams & Co. 1960), 212-36; David Lewis, ‘How to Define Theoretical Terms,’ journal of Philosophy 67 (1970), 427-46

29 For a fuller discussion of this method, see Causation, 13-25.

30 See, for example, David Armstong's Universals and Scientific Realism, volume II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1978), 91-3.

31 For the proof, see Causation, 278-9.

32 For a proof of a stronger theorem, from comparable postulates, see Causation, 328-35.

33 Causation, 296-303

34 This thesis needs to be qualified slightly, since it assumes that there are no ‘confirmation machines,’ and if this were false, it would be possible to have reason to believe that there were causally related events that did not fall under any law. For the relevant argument, see Edward Erwin, ‘The Confirmation Machine,’ Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science 8 (Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel 1971), 306-21.

35 I am indebted to David Armstrong, to Evan Fales, to Ernest Sosa, and to two anonymous referees of this journal for detailed written comments on an earlier draft, and to John Burgess, Lloyd Humberstone, Peter Menzies, Robert Pargetter, Philip Pettit, Michael Smith, Neil Tennant, and Aubrey Townsend for their comments on earlier versions which I read at Monash University, and at the Australian National University.