Stephen Barker

Must counterfactual analyses of causation appeal to chances and chance-raising in order to tame indeterministic causation? It is generally thought so. 1 Against the grain, I contend that appeal to chance-raising is not required to analyse chancy causation. In Section 1 below I argue that the standard cases motivating the chance-raising analysis – cases such as bombardments of radioactive atoms causing the decay of those atoms – should be treated as instances of preemption. Such cases, I urge, are open to exactly the same kind of analysis as cases of preemption in a deterministic setting. With that thought in mind, I set out to provide a unified counterfactual analysis of causation for both deterministic and indeterministic cases, without appeal to chance-raising. In Section 2, I outline an initial sketch for the deterministic case of the theory. The account is a descendant of Lewis's quasi-dependence analysis but expressed in terms of counterfactual embedding. I show how this theory copes with preemption, trumping and over-determination. In Section 3, I broach the vexed issue of the non-transitivity of cause. I accept that cause is not transitive, and modify the theory given in Section 2 to derive the final theory. The overall picture is roughly this: c caused e if and only if c and e occur and had c not occurred a disposition to a causal path issuing in e would not have been manifested in the circumstances. I show in Section 4 how this theory applies to chancy causation.

I argue that a new solution to the semantic paradoxes is possible based on truth-making. I show that with an appropriate understanding of what the ultimate truth and falsity makers of sentences are, it can be demonstrated that sentences like the liar are alethically undecidable. That means it cannot be said in principle whether such sentences are true, not true, false, not-false, neither true nor false, both true and false, and so on. I argue that this leads to a solution to the semantic paradoxes that appears to be free of revenge problems, allows us to maintain classical logic and the validity of the T-schema.

It seems to be generally accepted that (a) counterfactual conditionals are to be analysed in terms of possible worlds and inter-world relations of similarity and (b) causation is conceptually prior to counterfactuals. I argue here that both (a) and (b) are false. The argument against (a) is not a general metaphysical or epistemological one but simply that, structurally speaking, possible worlds theories are wrong: this is revealed when we try to extend them to cover the case of probabilistic counterfactuals. Indeed a type of counterfactual probability exists which cannot be expressed in possible worlds terms at all. The argument against (b) emerges when we look at the form of an adequate account of both probabilistic and non-probabilistic counterfactuals. I do this by sketching and defending an approach to counterfactuals that, first, invoke a generalized notion of cause as primitive and, secondly, is algorithmic in form: counterfactuals are evaluated algorithmically in terms of other counterfactuals, without vicious circularity. Structures like possible worlds do not play a role either in general truth-conditions or in evaluation. They are simply the wrong sorts of structures.