Max Kistler

Does science need a concept of causality, and if it does, how may this concept be analyzed? The chapter introduces to the main debates regarding causality in contemporary philosophy of science. Eliminativism, as defended by Russell, is the first target: it is argued that even if the concept of causality were eliminable in fundamental physics, it would still be needed in many other contexts, including those covered by other branches of science such as biology or neuroscience. Various possible explications for the concept of causation are then successively considered, in terms of counterfactual conditionals, of probability raising, in terms of manipulability and in terms of processes.

Humans have only finite discriminatory capacities. This simple fact seems to be incompatible with the existence of appearances, or “looks.” It seems to be refuted by the non-transitivity of the indiscriminability of colors. Let A, B, and C be three uniformly colored sur-faces presented to the view of a subject in optimal conditions, which resemble each other perfectly except that their colors differ slightly in the following way: the difference in color between A and B (as well as the difference between B and C ) is below the discrimination threshold, but the difference between A and C is over the threshold. By definition of an appearance, given that A and B appear (to the subject) as identical in color, A and B have the same appearance P1; likewise, B and C have the same appearance P2. B’s appearance is both P1 and P2. If each surface has only one color appearance, and if appearances exist, P1 = P2. But this implies that A and C have the same appearance, which contradicts the hypothesis that the subject can discriminate their colors. I suggest that this puzzle can be solved without accepting the transitivity of indiscriminability and without postulating that subjects have only fallible knowledge of their own appearances by using the concepts of power, disposition, and manifestation. The color of the surface of an object is a power, which gives a subject perceiving it various dispositions, and in particular dispositions to judge it equal or different from a second color. The colors of A, B, and C are three different powers. Each of them grounds many dispositions to appear to a given subject in different situations. The judgments of comparison that create the puzzle bear on colors, but are made on the basis of appearances, i.e., manifestations of the colors. These manifestations depend on the triggering circumstances: the appearance of B’s color in the context of a comparison with A is not identical with the appearance of B’s color in the context of a comparison with C.

Craver (2007) ha argumentado que la relevancia constitutiva puede descubrirse mediante la manipulabilidad mutua, basada en intervenciones (Woodward, 2003). Sin embargo, los requisitos sobre las intervenciones hacen imposible la manipulabilidad mutua de los mecanismos y sus constituyentes (Baumgartner & Gebharter, 2016). Se examinan dos propuestas para proporcionar criterios empíricos de relevancia constitutiva. Ambas proporcionan solo parte de la información necesaria para construir modelos de mecanismos que representen tanto los vínculos causales como las relaciones constitutivas. La explicación de Baumgartner, Casini y Krickel (2020) no es adecuada para mecanismos que contienen 1) cadenas causales de actividades y/o 2) actividades que funcionan en paralelo. Además, su requisito de detectar dos o más actividades simultáneamente no se ajusta a la práctica científica estándar. La tesis de Craver, Glennan y Povich (2021) según la cual la relevancia constitutiva puede reducirse a la «causalidad entre», entre la condición de entrada y la de salida de un mecanismo, no es adecuada para los mecanismos multinivel. Los modelos que no contienen ninguna representación de las relaciones constitutivas podrían representar las actividades de algún nivel fundamental hipotético. Sin embargo, tanto la existencia de dicho nivel fundamental como la aplicación de la causalidad a ese nivel son problemáticas. La explicación de Craver, Glennan y Povich de la construcción de modelos de mecanismos conduce al resultado paradójico de que no hay niveles y, por tanto, no hay mecanismos multinivel, sino solo cadenas causales de actividades de nivel fundamental.La clave para entender cómo se pueden construir modelos de mecanismos multinivel a partir de información empírica es que 1) los experimentos relevantes proporcionan directamente solo información sobre relaciones causales (contrariamente a lo que afirman Craver, 2007 y Baumgartner, Casini & Krickel, 2020), pero que (contrariamente a lo que afirman Craver, Glennan & Povich, 2021) esta información sobre relaciones causales puede afectar a variables de distintos niveles. Un modelo multinivel se construye en dos pasos. 1) En primer lugar, se construyen modelos parciales puramente causales para cada hipotética variable constitutiva Fi, sobre la base de experimentos descendentes y ascendentes que modifican o miden Fi de manera específica para cada nivel, 2) en segundo lugar, esos modelos parciales se fusionan en un modelo global que contiene tanto relaciones causales como de constitución entre variables, sobre la base de información sobre cada variable y restricciones espacio-temporales.

Most philosophers of physics are eliminativists about causation. Following Bertrand Russell’s lead, they think that causation is a folk concept that cannot be rationally reconstructed within a worldview informed by contemporary physics. Against this thesis, I argue that physics contributes to shaping the concept of causation, in two ways. (1) Special Relativity is a physical theory that expresses causal constraints. (2) The physical concept of a conserved quantity can be used in the functional reduction of the notion of causation. The empirical part of this reduction makes the hypothesis that the transference of an amount of a conserved quantity is a necessary and sufficient condition for causation. This hypothesis is defended against several objections from physics: that amounts of energy do not possess the appropriate identity conditions required for being able to be transmitted, that there is no universal principle of the conservation of energy in General Relativity, and that there are at least two types of physical systems in which causation does not involve any transference: entangled systems in quantum mechanics and the Aharonov–Bohm effect. In order to show that physics provides means to elaborate the concept of causation it is important to avoid certain misunderstandings. In particular, the claim that there is causation in a physical world does not mean that causation is an additional ingredient of the “furniture” of the world, over and above the ingredients identified by physics.

This is the first English translation of _Causalite´ et Lois de La Nature,_ and is an important contribution to the theory of causation_._ Max Kistler reconstructs a unified concept of causation that is general enough to adequately deal with both elementary physical processes, and the macroscopic level of phenomena we encounter in everyday life. This book will be of great interest to philosophers of science and metaphysics, and also to students and scholars of philosophy of mind where concepts of causation and law play a prominent role.

I propose an argument for the thesis that laws of nature are necessary in the sense of holding in all worlds sharing the properties of the actual world, on the basis of a principle I propose to call the Causal Criterion of Reality (CCR). The CCR says: for an entity to be real it is necessary and sufficient that it is capable to make a difference to causal interactions. The crucial idea here is that the capacity to interact causally - or to contribute to determining causal interactions - is not only the ultimate metaphysical ground for the existence of an entity, but it also provides a criterion for determining the nature of that entity, i.e. its properties. The alternative is to conceive of laws of nature as contingent: they could be different from what they are like in the actual world, where that possibility is understood to be metaphysical, not only epistemic. For the sake of this paper, I shall accept Armstrong's (1983; 1997) thesis that laws of nature are relations between universals. I also follow Armstrong in the view that both the existence and the properties of particulars are metaphysically independent of the existence and identity of other particular. However, what is controversial and what I shall challenge is his thesis that universals are like particulars in the following respect: according to Armstrong, each universal is a logically distinct entity whose existence and identity is independent of the existence and identity of other universals. My aim in this paper is to show that the identity of a universal is entirely determined by its lawful relations to other universals. The crucial premise I use is the thesis that the CCR is a universal criterion, which applies both to particulars and universals. From the thesis that the identity of a universal is exclusively determined by laws, it follows that laws are necessary in the sense that they cannot differ without the universals they link also being different. This creates a difficulty for those authors who, as Armstrong, accept the CCR but nevertheless defend the view that laws are contingent.

With the aim of giving a naturalistic foundation to the notion of mental representation, Fred Dretske (1981;1988) has put forward and developed the idea that the relation between a representation and its intentional content is grounded on an informational relation. In this explanatory model, mental representations are conceived of as states of organisms which a learning process has selected to play a functional role: a necessary condition for fulfilling this role is that the organism or some proper part of it (presumably situated in the brain) is a natural indicator of the occurrence of a determinate type of event in the environment of the organism (or in the organism but outside of the proper part serving as the indicator). A state of the organism is a natural indicator of a type of event if and only if it carries information about the occurrence of that type of event. Jerry Fodor (1987) has devised and followed another strategy which consists in considering the relation between a mental representation and its intentional object as a relation of lawful, or nomic, dependence. A representational state of an organism has an objective content in virtue of the existence of a relation of nomic dependence between this state - presumably a property of the brain of the organism - and some objective property in the world. This dependence also creates a regular correlation between the occurrences of representational states of a certain type and the states of affairs whose type is their representational content. Both approaches encounter indeterminacy problems: for each, there exist situations in which the explanatory model chosen - information flow or nomic dependence - does not succeed in selecting, purely on the basis of the constraints characteristic of that model, one out of several potential contents for a given representational state. In such cases, that state is related to more than one type of events in accordance with the informational or nomic constraints imposed by those theories. In what follows, I examine an attempt by Pierre Jacob (1997) to solve two problems of indeterminacy threatening the informational theory of mental representation. According to Jacob, one of these problems can be solved with the help of the distinction between the source which is the target of the information and the channel over which the information is transmitted, whereas the solution to the other problem requires the introduction of the concept of function. I shall begin with a consideration of the distinction, with respect to a situation of information transmission, between the source and the channel. I argue that both the source and the channel, and thus the information transmitted, depend not only on the external situation which characterises the source, the channel and the receiving organism, but also on the previous knowledge and the informational needs of the receiver. I then try to show that this relativity of information undermines the solution Jacob proposes to one of the problems of indeterminacy of representational content. Finally, I examine the possibility considered by Dretske and Jacob to solve this "problem of the reference class" due to the mentioned relativity of information, by grounding the flow of information on lawful dependence instead of statistical dependence. I shall propose two arguments showing first that these two groundings are not equivalent and second that nomic dependence is inappropriate as a grounding for information flow. I conclude by suggesting that the problem of the reference class can be solved within the framework of the informational approach, on the condition of enriching it with functional considerations.

During the last decades there has been a remarkable renewal of interest in theories of causation which is linked to the decline of the orthodoxy of the Logical empiricist school. A number of alternatives to the traditional covering-law account have been proposed. I shall defend a version of an approach that has been undeservedly neglected: the Transference Theory (TT) of causation. Accounts of this type elaborate the intuition that there is a material link between the cause and the effect, consisting of something transmitted between them.

Causation is analysed in terms of transference of amounts of conserved quantities between events. Such amounts are tropes. However, causal explanations are directly made true, not by transmission relations but by relations of causal responsibility, of a fact Fc about the cause event c for a fact Ge about the effect event e. Causal responsibility is analysed in terms of causation between events c and e and a law of nature holding between the properties F and G. This account overcomes many objections against other process theories, as well as against accounts in terms of counterfactual dependency and conditional probabilities.

The idea that persons or animals possess properties of two types, physical and mental, or psychological and cognitive, inevitably raises the question of how such cognitive properties can be causally efficacious, with respect to other cognitive, physiological, or physical properties, of the person herself or her environment. People, though composed exclusively of atoms like any other material object, have emergent properties that none of those components possess. Among them are cognitive properties. These properties give a person the power to cause both cognitive and physiological events and processes. The Material Mind defends a version of reductionist materialism. It modifies the conceptual framework of the debate by situating psychological and physiological properties of persons within a hierarchy of levels of reality. The Material Mind develops a concept of reduction that is compatible both with scientific change and with the possibility of multiple reduction bases. It shows that cognitive and other higher-level properties can be construed as causal powers, develops a concept of emergence compatible with reduction, and shows that the integration of the mind into a scientific conception of the world does not deprive mental properties and events of causal efficacy. The book defends the possibility of downward causation of physiological effects by cognitive causes, by questioning the justification of both the principle of the causal closure of the physical domain and the principle of causal-explanatory exclusion.

This is the first English translation of _Causalite´ et Lois de La Nature,_ and is an important contribution to the theory of causation_._ Max Kistler reconstructs a unified concept of causation that is general enough to adequately deal with both elementary physical processes, and the macroscopic level of phenomena we encounter in everyday life. This book will be of great interest to philosophers of science and metaphysics, and also to students and scholars of philosophy of mind where concepts of causation and law play a prominent role.

The term “potentiality” is nowadays used neither in physics nor in most philosophical interpretations of physical theories. However, it can be helpful to use it in the context of the Metaphysical interpretation of both classical and quantum physics. Potentiality is only pragmatically different from dispositionality. The use of the term “potentiality” is appropriate under two conditions: (1) the actualization takes (more or less) time and (2) the potentiality makes its actualization (more or less) probable but not necessary. Examples in classical physics are potentials (such as the gravitational potential) and capacities (such as heat capacity). Heisenberg used the concept of potentiality in his interpretation of quantum mechanical systems in superposed states. I develop an interpretation of Heisenberg’s conception according to which, (1) a quantum system that is, with respect to a given observable, in a superposed state, is potentially (but not actually) in one of its available eigenstates; (2) the superposed state itself is a powerful state that plays the role of a theoretical Property: It provides a unifying explanation of a set of dispositions, corresponding to the measurement of various observables, where the measurement is the triggering condition and the outcome the manifestation.

I propose an argument for the thesis that laws of nature are necessary in a metaphysical sense, on the basis of a principle I propose to call the Causal Criterion of Reality (CCR). The CCR says: for an entity to be real it is necessary and sufficient that it is capable to make a difference to causal interactions. The crucial idea is that the capacity to interact causally - or to contribute to determining causal interactions - is not only the ultimate justification for the existence of an entity, but it also provides a criterion for determining the nature of that entity, i.e. its properties. The alternative is to conceive of laws of nature as contingent: they could be different from what they are like in the actual world, where that possibility is understood to be metaphysical, not only epistemic. For the sake of this paper, I shall accept Armstrong's (1983; 1997) thesis that laws of nature are relations between universals. I also follow Armstrong in the view that both the existence and the properties of particulars are metaphysically independent of the existence and identity of other particulars. However, what is controversial and what I shall challenge is his thesis that universals are like particulars in the following respect: according to Armstrong, each universal is a logically distinct entity whose existence and identity is independent of the existence and identity of other universals. My aim in this paper is to show that the identity of a universal is entirely determined by its lawful relations to other universals. The crucial premise I use is the thesis that the CCR is a universal criterion that applies both to particulars and universals. From the thesis that the identity of a universal is exclusively determined by laws, it follows that laws are necessary in the sense that they cannot differ without the universals they link also being different. This creates a difficulty for those authors who, as Armstrong, accept the CCR but nevertheless defend the view that laws are contingent.

The search for a nomological account of what determines the content of concepts as they are represented in cognitive systems, is an important part of the general project of explaining intentional phenomena in naturalistic terms. I examine Fodor's (1990a) "Theory of Content" and criticize his strategy of combining constraints in nomological terms with contraints in terms of actual causal relations. The paper focuses on the problem of the indeterminacy of the content of natural kind concepts. A concept like water can pick out either a phenomenological property or a scientific one. Moreover, even on the assumption that the latter is shown to be most adequate, a given sample will still come out as falling into different natural kinds, according to the taxomomy of each particular science of which it constitutes an object. Both chemistry and physics contain concepts which are scientific counterparts of the common sense concept water, yet their extensions differ. As a criterion for determining the most relevant science for a given concept, I suggest to ask which science is most specific for the typical interactions of the subject possessing the concept, with her environment. The use of this criterion also permits one to show that a nomological theory is not necessarily verificationist, contrary to what has been claimed by Fodor and Boghossian (1991).

It is controversial whether a property can both be dispositional and causally efficacious. Mackie and Armstrong hold that dispositions can be causes, Prior, Pargetter and Jackson argue that they cannot. However, all parties of the debate agree on two ideas: 1) The dispositional properties at issue are macroscopic, and in principle reducible to a microscopic reduction base. 2) Only the microphysical base properties are causally efficacious. The disagreement is about whether the macroscopic disposition inherits this efficacy by being identical to its reduction base (Armstrong) or is epiphenomenal because not identical to its reduction base (Prior, Pargetter and Jackson). I challenge thesis 2, which seems plausible only if one conflates two senses of the word “basis” that can be clearly distinguished thanks to the predicate/property distinction. I show that the categorical basis of a disposition need not be its microscopic reduction basis. This allows me to defend the idea that macroscopic dispositional properties can be distinct from their microscopic base properties and nevertheless efficacious. Part of the importance of this topic lies in its bearing on the nature of mental properties: If I am correct about macroscopic dispositions in general, it becomes plausible to argue that mental properties of a subject are dispositional properties which are nevertheless causally efficacious for the subject's actions.

Is it sometimes indeterminate whether two events or variables are causally related? Can causal statements be vague? The analysis of three potential types of cases of causal indeterminacy and causal vagueness yields an affirmative answer. The claim that some cases of omission, and some cases of prevention, give rise to indeterminate causal relations depends on the premise that omissions and preventions can be causal. A second type of indeterminate causation corresponds to causal statements whose truth value is indeterminate because they contain vague predicates. Such vagueness can have two sources. Only one yields indeterminate causation. Finally, there is indeterministic probabilistic causation. If “indeterministic overdetermination” is interpreted as metaphysical rather than epistemic, it is inappropriate to speak of indeterminacy. Rather, there is no fact of the matter about which of the two sources of probability raising really is the cause. It is more appropriate to say that both are contributing causes. “Indeterministic trumping” gives rise to a form of indeterminacy that belongs to the category of the open future. Once the effect has occurred, no indeterminacy remains.

One of the major attempts to avoid this problem is to claim that the subject matter of laws are ascriptions of dispositions, powers, capacities etc., and not the regular behaviour we find in nature. 'Causal capacities can be measured as surely or unsurely as anything else that science deals with. Sometimes we measure capacities in a physics laboratory'. Many philosophers of science think that many laws of nature are so called ceteris paribus laws. Take the following statements for examples: 'All laws are ceteris paribus laws. Although many think that there are ceteris paribus laws not only in the proviso ridden social sciences but even all the way down to fundamental physics the ceteris paribus clause in law statements is problematic. Real objects nearly never display the laws which are supposed to hold for them. If taken as statements about regularities laws are either all false or they are ceteris paribus laws because there are hardly ever regularities.

Most philosophers of physics are eliminativists about causation. Following Bertrand Russell’s lead, they think that causation is a folk concept that cannot be rationally reconstructed within a worldview informed by contemporary physics. Against this thesis, I argue that physics contributes to shaping the concept of causation, in two ways. 1. Special Relativity is a physical theory that expresses causal constraints. 2. The physical concept of a conserved quantity can be used in the functional reduction of the notion of causation. The empirical part of this reduction makes the hypothesis that the transference of an amount of a conserved quantity is a necessary and sufficient condition for causation. This hypothesis is defended against several objections from physics: that amounts of energy do not possess the appropriate identity conditions required for being able to be transmitted, that there is no universal principle of the conservation of energy in General Relativity, and that there are at least two types of physical systems in which causation does not involve any transference: entangled systems in quantum mechanics and the Aharanov-Bohm effect. In order to show that physics provides means to elaborate the concept of causation it is important to avoid certain misunderstandings. In particular, the claim that there is causation in a physical world does not mean that causation is an additional ingredient of the "furniture" of the world, over and above the ingredients identified by physics.

The identity of a natural kind can be construed in terms of its causal profile. This conception is more appropriate to science than two alternatives. The identity of a natural kind is not determined by one causal role because one natural kind can have many causal roles and several functions and because some functions are shared by different kinds. Furthermore, the microstructuralist thesis is wrong: The identity of certain natural kinds is not determined by their microstructure. It is true that if A and B have the same microstructural composition then a sample of a c. hemical substance A is of the same chemical substance as a sample of B. However, the reverse does not hold. It is not the case that if a sample of a chemical substance A is of the same chemical substance as a sample of B then A and B have the same microstructural composition. This is because a macroscopic NK can be “multiconstituted” by different microstructures.

The aim of this paper is to provide an account of causation that is compatible with both common sense intuition and science. In the next section, I briefly rehearse the most important philosophical strategies for analysing the concept of causation. Then I investigate, in the third section, criteria of correctness for a philosophical theory of causation. In the fourth section, I review some important counterexamples to the traditional accounts mentioned in the second section, and suggest, in the fifth, that these counterexamples can be seen as grounded on two kinds of intuitions. The sixth section presents results of the linguistic analysis of common sense causal statements. In the seventh section, I offer an analysis of causality in agreement with the criteria elaborated in the third section: Relations of causal responsibility make true causal statements of one type identified in the sixth section, and underlie the intuitions such statements express. Such relations contain as a part another, simpler relation: the causal relation between events, which makes true statements of the other sort identified in the sixth section. The eighth section answers two important objections, one against the thesis that facts can be causes, the other against the thesis that events can be causes.