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138Causal models, token causation, and processesPhilosophy of Science 71 (5): 820-832. 2004.Judea Pearl (2000) has recently advanced a theory of token causation using his structural equations approach. This paper examines some counterexamples to Pearl's theory, and argues that the theory can be modified in a natural way to overcome them.
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13The Folk Theory of Colours and the Causes of Colour ExperienceIn Ian Ravenscroft (ed.), Minds, Ethics, and Conditionals: Themes from the Philosophy of Frank Jackson, Oxford University Press. 2009.
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127This paper criticizes a recent account of token causation that states that negative causation involving absences of events is of a fundamentally different kind from positive causation involving events. The paper employs the structural equations framework to advance a theory of token causation that applies uniformly to positive and negative causation alike.
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35Reasons and causes revisitedIn Mario De Caro & David Macarthur (eds.), Naturalism and Normativity, Cambridge University Press. 2010.29 page
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92Norms, Causes, and Alternative PossibilitiesBehavioral and Brain Sciences 33 (4): 346-347. 2010.I agree with Knobe's claim in his “Person as Scientist, Person as Moralist” article that moral considerations are integral to the workings of people's competence in making causal judgments. However, I disagree with the particular explanation he gives of the way in which moral considerations influence causal judgments. I critically scrutinize his explanation and outline a better one.
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14Is causation a genuine relation?In Hallvard Lillehammer & Gonzalo Rodriguez-Pereyra (eds.), Real Metaphysics: Essays in Honour of D. H. Mellor, Routledge. 2002.had a salutary influence in encouraging metaphysicians to think about these issues of each other. But, as it happens, they come across their victim at the same time and place. Both assassins take careful aim, their fingers poised to pull their in clear-headed, realist ways.
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227Counterfactual theories of causationStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2008.The basic idea of counterfactual theories of causation is that the meaning of causal claims can be explained in terms of counterfactual conditionals of the form “If A had not occurred, C would not have occurred”. While counterfactual analyses have been given of type-causal concepts, most counterfactual analyses have focused on singular causal or token-causal claims of the form “event c caused event e”. Analyses of token-causation have become popular in the last thirty years, especially since the…Read more
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12The Causes of Colour ExperienceIn Ian Ravenscroft (ed.), Minds, Ethics, and Conditionals: Themes from the Philosophy of Frank Jackson, Oxford University Press. pp. 141. 2009.
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Laws, modality, and Humean supervenienceIn John Bacon, Keith Campbell & Lloyd Reinhardt (eds.), Ontology, Causality and Mind: Essays in Honour of D M Armstrong, Cambridge University Press. 1993.
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394Critical notice of Alexander Bird, Nature's Metaphysics: Laws and PropertiesAnalysis. forthcoming.This book advocates dispositional essentialism, the view that natural properties have dispositional essences.1 So, for example, the essence of the property of being negatively charged is to be disposed to attract positively charged objects. From this fact it follows that it is a law that all negatively charged objects will attract positively 10 charged objects; and indeed that this law is metaphysically necessary. Since the identity of the property of being negatively charged is determined by it…Read more
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The role of causation in philosophical naturalismIn D. Macarthur M. de Caro (ed.), The Claims of Naturalism, Harvard University Press. 2002.
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131A unified account of causal relataAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 67 (1). 1989.This Article does not have an abstract
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117Nature's metaphysicsAnalysis 69 (4): 769-778. 2009.This book advocates dispositional essentialism, the view that natural properties have dispositional essences. 1 So, for example, the essence of the property of being negatively charged is to be disposed to attract positively charged objects. From this fact it follows that it is a law that all negatively charged objects will attract positively charged objects; and indeed that this law is metaphysically necessary. Since the identity of the property of being negatively charged is determined by its …Read more
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151In Defence of Fictionalism about Possible WorldsAnalysis 54 (1). 1994.Modal functionalism is the view that talk about possible worlds should be construed as talk about fictional objects. The version of modal fictionalism originally presented by Gideon Rosen adopted a simple prefixing strategy for fictionalising possible worlds analyses of modal propositions. However, Stuart Brock and Rosen himself in a later article have independently advanced an objection that shows that the prefixing strategy cannot serve fictionalist purposes. In this paper we defend fictionali…Read more
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16Difference-making in contextIn John Collins, Ned Hall & Laurie Paul (eds.), Causation and Counterfactuals, Mit Press. 2004.Several different approaches to the conceptual analysis of causation are guided by the idea that a cause is something that makes a difference to its effects. These approaches seek to elucidate the concept of causation by explicating the concept of a difference-maker in terms of better-understood concepts. There is no better example of such an approach than David Lewis’ analysis of causation, in which he seeks to explain the concept of a difference-maker in counterfactual terms. Lewis introduced …Read more
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10Causing Actions by Paul Pietroski (review)Mind and Language 18 (4): 440-446. 2003.The philosophical problem of mental causation concerns a clash between commonsense and scientific views about the causation of human behaviour. On the one hand, commonsense suggests that our actions are caused by our mental states—our thoughts, intentions, beliefs and so on. On the other hand, neuroscience assumes that all bodily movements are caused by neurochemical events. It is implausible to suppose that our actions are causally overdetermined in the same way that the ringing of a bell may b…Read more
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64Causation in contextIn Huw Price & Richard Corry (eds.), Causation, Physics and the Constitution of Reality: Russell’s Republic Revisited, Oxford University Press. 2007.33 page
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104The causal structure of mechanismsStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 43 (4): 796-805. 2012.Recently, a number of philosophers of science have claimed that much explanation in the sciences, especially in the biomedical and social sciences, is mechanistic explanation. I argue the account of mechanistic explanation provided in this tradition has not been entirely satisfactory, as it has neglected to describe in complete detail the crucial causal structure of mechanistic explanation. I show how the interventionist approach to causation, especially within a structural equations framework, …Read more
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509Probabilistic causation and causal processes: A critique of LewisPhilosophy of Science 56 (4): 642-663. 1989.This paper examines a promising probabilistic theory of singular causation developed by David Lewis. I argue that Lewis' theory must be made more sophisticated to deal with certain counterexamples involving pre-emption. These counterexamples appear to show that in the usual case singular causation requires an unbroken causal process to link cause with effect. I propose a new probabilistic account of singular causation, within the framework developed by Lewis, which captures this intuition
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66Mental causation in the physical worldIn Sophie Gibb, E. J. Lowe & Rögnvaldur Ingthorsson (eds.), Mental Causation and Ontology, Oxford University Press. 2013.
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2HACKING, I.: "Representing and Intervening: Introductory Topics in the Philosophy of Natural Science" (review)Australasian Journal of Philosophy 63 (n/a): 540. 1985.
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24thought-provoking exploration of the role of laws and models in the sciences, with In her alternative metaphysical framework, Cartwright relegates regularities in special emphasis on physics and economics. Cartwright proposes a novel metaphysics..
Peter Menzies
(1953 - 2015)
Areas of Specialization
Metaphysics |
Philosophy of Mind |
General Philosophy of Science |
Areas of Interest
Metaphysics |
Philosophy of Language |
Philosophy of Mind |
General Philosophy of Science |