Huw Price

Making a Difference presents fifteen original essays on causation and counterfactuals by an international team of experts. Collectively, they represent the state of the art on these topics. The essays in this volume are inspired by the life and work of Peter Menzies, who made a difference in the lives of students, colleagues, and friends. Topics covered include: the semantics of counterfactuals, agency theories of causation, the context-sensitivity of causal claims, structural equation models, mechanisms, mental causation, causal exclusion argument, free will, and the consequence argument.

Can an agent deliberating about an action A hold a meaningful credence that she will do A? 'No', say some authors, for 'Deliberation Crowds Out Prediction' (DCOP). Others disagree, but we argue here that such disagreements are often terminological. We explain why DCOP holds in a Ramseyian operationalist model of credence, but show that it is trivial to extend this model so that DCOP fails. We then discuss a model due to Joyce, and show that Joyce's rejection of DCOP rests on terminological choices about terms such as 'intention', 'prediction', and 'belief'. Once these choices are in view, they reveal underlying agreement between Joyce and the DCOP-favouring tradition that descends from Ramsey. Joyce's Evidential Autonomy Thesis (EAT) is effectively DCOP, in different terminological clothing. Both principles rest on the so-called 'transparency' of first-person present-tensed reflection on one's own mental states.

The best case for thinking that quantum mechanics is nonlocal rests on Bell's Theorem, and later results of the same kind. However, the correlations characteristic of Einstein–Podolsky–Rosen (EPR)–Bell (EPRB) experiments also arise in familiar cases elsewhere in quantum mechanics (QM), where the two measurements involved are timelike rather than spacelike separated; and in which the correlations are usually assumed to have a local causal explanation, requiring no action-at-a-distance (AAD). It is interesting to ask how this is possible, in the light of Bell's Theorem. We investigate this question, and present two options. Either (i) the new cases are nonlocal too, in which case AAD is more widespread in QM than has previously been appreciated (and does not depend on entanglement, as usually construed); or (ii) the means of avoiding AAD in the new cases extends in a natural way to EPRB, removing AAD in these cases too. There is a third option, viz., that the new cases are strongly disanalogous to EPRB. But this option requires an argument, so far missing, that the physical world breaks the symmetries which otherwise support the analogy. In the absence of such an argument, the orthodox combination of views—action-at-a-distance in EPRB, but local causality in its timelike analogue—is less well established than it is usually assumed to be. 1 Introduction1.1 Background1.2 Outline of the argument2 The Experiments2.1 Standard EPRB2.2 Sideways EPRB2.3 Comparing the experiments2.4 The need for beables3 The Symmetry Considerations3.1 The action symmetry3.2 Time-symmetry in SEPRB4 The Basic Trilemma4.1 An intuitive defence of Option III?5 Avoiding the Trilemma?6 The Classical Objection7 Defending Option III7.1 The free will argument7.2 Independence and consistency8 Entanglement and Epistemic Perspective

The dustjacket of The Common Mind bears a photograph of the traffic at a Sydney intersection on a wet winter’s evening in 1938. It is rush hour, and the homeward traffic conveys a fine sense of common purpose. The scene has a special resonance for me, for I stood at that very spot with my parents and brothers one similar evening in 1966, on the day we first arrived in Australia. There was a marked pedestrian crossing there then, which we set out to negotiate, taking it for granted that the relevant conventions were those we were used to in rural England. But pedestrians and rush hour traffic were both under the control of a policeman—one of his predecessors can be seen in the photograph—who had just given the traffic priority. He loudly familiarised us with the local customs, and the kind of emotions we felt play an important part in Philip Pettit’s vision of the possibility and grounds of a satisfactory human society: the approval and disapproval of the community provides an intangible hand that guides defaulters into line.

Causalists and Evidentialists can agree about the right course of action in an (apparent) Newcomb problem, if the causal facts are not as initially they seem. If declining $1,000 causes the Predictor to have placed $1m in the opaque box, CDT agrees with EDT that one-boxing is rational. This creates a difficulty for Causalists. We explain the problem with reference to Dummett's work on backward causation and Lewis's on chance and crystal balls. We show that the possibility that the causal facts might be properly judged to be non-standard in Newcomb problems leads to a dilemma for Causalism. One horn embraces a subjectivist understanding of causation, in a sense analogous to Lewis's own subjectivist conception of objective chance. In this case the analogy with chance reveals a terminological choice point, such that either (i) CDT is completely reconciled with EDT, or (ii) EDT takes precedence in the cases in which the two theories give different recommendations. The other horn of the dilemma rejects subjectivism, but now the analogy with chance suggests that it is simply mysterious why causation so construed should constrain rational action.

There is a long-standing disagreement in the philosophy of probability and Bayesian decision theory about whether an agent can hold a meaningful credence about an upcoming action, while she deliberates about what to do. Can she believe that it is, say, 70% probable that she will do A, while she chooses whether to do A? No, say some philosophers, for Deliberation Crowds Out Prediction (DCOP), but others disagree. In this paper, we propose a valid core for DCOP, and identify terminological causes for some of the apparent disputes.

One of the outstanding achievements of recent cosmology has been to offer some prospect of a unified explanation of temporal asymmetry. The explanation is in two main parts, and runs something like this. First, the various asymmetries we observe are all thermodynamic in origin – all products of the fact that we live in an epoch in which the universe is far from thermodynamic equilibrium. Second, this thermodynamic disequilibrium is associated with the condition of the universe very soon after the Big Bang – the essential point being that in the rapidly expanding universe of the time, gravity is able to create organisation much faster than other processes can destroy it. The stars, galaxies and other forms of organisation we find in the present universe are all products of this early period. Such concentrated energy sources themselves make possible the kinds of asymmetric phenomena with which we are most familiar, such as life itself. If this explanation proves to be right it will surely rank as one of the most impressive achievements in the whole of natural philosophy. Where else do we find this breathtaking scale, this extraordinary conjunction of fundamental physics, the first moments of Creation, the possibility of life and the basic character of human experience? And it is very much a contemporary achievement: even if its roots go back on one side to the investigation of time asymmetry in nineteenth century statistical mechanics, and on the other to Hubble's discovery in the 1920's of the expansion of the universe, the body of the picture has only begun to be filled in in the last twenty or thirty years. This fascinating story has recently been given some well-deserved publicity in Stephen Hawking's bestseller, A Brief History of Time – well-deserved, not least, because Hawking himself is responsible for a considerable part of the story as it presently stands

Lecture I begins with a distinction between two themes in philosophical naturalism. The first theme takes science to be our best guide to what there is, the second takes it to be our best guide to the nature of our own thought and talk. Thus the first theme ('object naturalism') motivates a scientifically-constrained metaphysics, while the second ('subject naturalism') motivates a scientifically-constrained philosophy of language and philosophical psychology. The lecture discusses a sense in which these two themes may conflict: in particular, a sense in which subject naturalism may undermine a presupposition of object naturalism. The presupposition in question is the assumption that belief, judgement and assertion are 'referential', or 'representational', in some theoretically robust sense. In showing that this assumption is itself open to naturalistic challenge, the lecture identifies a little-recognised vulnerability in popular forms of (object) naturalism. The remaining lectures aim to show, first, what conception(s) of representation might replace the assumption in question; and second, what the project of philosophical naturalism looks like, in the light of these changes. Lecture II begins with the so-called bifurcation thesis -- the view that speech acts into descriptive and non-descriptive categories. The lecture advocates a different bifurcation, between two notions of representation: an 'external', world-tracking notion, and an 'internal', inferentialist notion. I argue that traditional representationalism confuses these notions. Lecture III outlines a conception of the project of naturalistic philosophy, in the light of this new bifurcation thesis. The recognition that not all representations in the inferential sense need be representation in the world-tracking sense permits a new pluralism within the former class: a pluralism about the functions of representation (in the former sense) in the lives of natural creatures in a natural environment. I emphasise that this kind of pluralism is orthogonal to familiar programs for pluralism in the philosophy of science. It involves a new dimension of variability, that conventional representationalism simply hides from view.

Bertrand Russell’s celebrated essay “On the Notion of Cause” was first delivered to the Aristotelian Society on 4 November 1912, as Russell’s Presidential Address. The piece is best known for a passage in which its author deftly positions himself between the traditional metaphysics of causation and the British crown, firing broadsides in both directions: “The law of causality”, Russell declares, “Like much that passes muster in philosophy, is a relic of a bygone age, surviving, like the monarchy, only because it is erroneously supposed to do no harm.” To mark the lecture’s centenary, I offer a contemporary view of the issues Russell here puts on the table, and of the health or otherwise, at the end of the essay’s first century, of his notorious conclusion.

Physics takes for granted that interacting physical systems with no common history are independent, before their interaction. This principle is time-asymmetric, for no such restriction applies to systems with no common future, after an interaction. The time-asymmetry is normally attributed to boundary conditions. I argue that there are two distinct independence principles of this kind at work in contemporary physics, one of which cannot be attributed to boundary conditions, and therefore conflicts with the assumed T (or CPT) symmetry of microphysics. I note that this may have interesting ramifications in quantum mechanics.

In the first chapter of From Metaphysics to Ethics, Frank Jackson begins, as he puts it, ‘by explaining how serious metaphysics by its very nature raises the location problem.’ (1998, p. 1) He gives us two examples of location problems. The first concerns semantic properties, such as truth and reference: Some physical structures are true. For example, if I were to utter a token of the type ‘Grass is green’, the structure I would thereby bring into existence would be true ... How are the semantic properties of the sentence related to the non-semantic properties of the sentence? Where, if anywhere, are the semantic properties of truth, content and reference to be found in the non-semantic, physical or naturalistic account of the sentence?’ (1998, p. 2) Jackson notes two possible answers to questions of this kind. The first denies that there are any such semantic properties.

The status and respectability of alethic modality was always a point of contention and divergence between naturalism and empiricism. It poses no problems in principle for naturalism, since modal vocabulary is an integral part of all the candidate naturalistic base vocabularies. Fundamental physics is above all a language of laws; the special sciences distinguish between true and false counterfactual claims; and ordinary empirical talk is richly dispositional. By contrast, modality has been a stumbling-block for the empiricist tradition ever since Hume forcefully formulated his epistemological and ultimately semantic objections to the concepts of law and necessary connection. (, Lecture , §).

Like coastal cities in the third millennium, important areas of human discourse seem threatened by the rise of modern science. The problem isn't new, of course, or wholly unwelcome. The tide of naturalism has been rising since the seventeenth century, and the rise owes more to clarity than to pollution in the intellectual atmosphere. All the same, the regions under threat are some of the most central in human life--the four Ms, for example: Morality, Modality, Meaning and the Mental. Some of the key issues in contemporary metaphysics concern the place and fate of such concepts in a naturalistic world view.

This paper suggests a novel reinterpretation of the mathematical core of Wheeler-Feynman absorber theory, and hence a new route to the conclusion that the temporal asymmetry of classical electromagnetic radiation has the same origin as that of thermodynamics. The argument begins (Sec. 2) with a careful analysis of what the apparent asymmetry of radiation actually involves. Two major flaws in the standard version of the Wheeler-Feynman treatment of radiative asymmetry are then identified (Secs. 4–5), and the proposed reinterpretation is described (Sec. 6). This avoids the two flaws previously mentioned, and also the problematic dependence of radiation on cosmological structure

A number of writers have been attracted to the idea that some of the peculiarities of quantum theory might be manifestations of 'backward' or 'retro' causality, underlying the quantum description. This idea has been explored in the literature in two main ways: firstly in a variety of explicit models of quantum systems, and secondly at a conceptual level. This note introduces a third approach, intended to complement the other two. It describes a simple toy model, which, under a natural interpretation, shows how retrocausality can emerge from simple global constraints. The model is also useful in permitting a clear distinction between the kind of retrocausality likely to be of interest in QM, and a different kind of reverse causality, with which it is liable to be confused. The model is proposed in the hope that future elaborations might throw light on the potential of retrocausality to account for quantum phenomena.

Wittgenstein is often thought to have challenged the view that assertion is an important theoretical category in a philosophical view of language. One of Wittgenstein’s main themes in the early sections of the Investigations is that philosophy misses important distinctions about the uses of language, distinctions hidden from us by ‘the uniform appearances of words.’ (1968, #11) As Wittgenstein goes on to say: It is like looking into the cabin of a locomotive. We see handles all looking more or less alike. (Naturally, since they are all supposed to be handled.) But one is the handle of a crank which can be moved continuously (it regulates the opening of a valve); another is the handle of a switch, which has only two effective positions, it is either off or on; a third is the handle of a brake-lever, the harder one pulls on it, the harder it brakes; a fourth, the handle of a pump: it has an effect only so long as it is moved to and fro. (1968, #12) Few contemporary philosophers share Wittgenstein’s evident familiarity with cabin of a steam locomotive, and in general, most of us are increasingly remote from all but the most superficial understanding of the underlying functions of the tools on which we rely. So we are perhaps even more prone to the mistake that Wittgenstein thinks that philosophy makes with respect to language, that of regarding it as one tool rather than many: ‘Think of the tools in a tool-box: there is a hammer, pliers, a saw, a screw-driver, a rule, a glue-pot, glue, nails and screws.—The functions of words are as diverse as the functions of these objects.’1 (1968, #11)