Ned Hall

I raise two problems that point to the need for further refinements of the analysis of causation offered by Andreas and Günther. The first arises from cases of joint causation with redundancy; I argue that while their analysis as given cannot handle such cases, there is a well-motivated modification that can. The second involves a challenge that arises when we try to extend the analysis to cover cases that cannot be modeled with simple, binary, ‘did the event occur or not?’ variables. After teasing out this challenge, I offer some tentative suggestions for how (and how not) to approach it.

What has emerged from our discussion is that there is a deep divide in our intuitions about causation, and correspondingly, in how we want to handle two very central issues: problems with redundant causation, most notably with late preemption and overdetermination, and problems with causation involving omissions. We see a deep intuitive tension in the way we want to judge these cases, one that creates serious trouble for any reductive treatment that wants to approach causation in a uniform manner. And we are still looking for an acceptable, suitably reductive treatment of causation involving omissions, and a reductive way of combining causal structures while still drawing distinctions between the different types that are to be analyzed in different ways. We discuss how using the method by counterexample to search for a reductive theory of causation, and its sister search for an analysis of the concept of causation, generates an enormous bounty by opening up a number of interesting and potentially fruitful lines of enquiry, emphasize the importance of keeping track of differences in methodological approach, and close with the observation that a detailed understanding of the twists and turns in the discussion of causation is crucial for a range of debates in philosophy and debates in other fields, like economics, law, sociology and psychology.

Transitivity seems to underlie basic features of our causal reasoning: it is typical to justify a claim that _C_ causes _E_ by pointing out that _C_ causes _D_, which in turn causes _E_. Preserving transitivity seems to be a basic desideratum for an adequate analysis of causation, and appealing to it has often seemed essential for handling problem cases like those involving preemption. But recent work on causation has raised serious challenges to the claim that it is invariably transitive. The aim of this chapter is to distinguish these various challenges and to consider several responses to these challenges in detail. To that end, we critically discuss a causal modelling proposal and a contrastive proposal for handling challenging cases that combine transitivity with double prevention. We also discuss the nuances of switching cases, and show how to avoid mismatch of aspects by changing to a more subtle treatment of causes and effects.

This chapter focuses on examples that, in one way or another, involve omissions, that is, failures of events to occur. We discuss the metaphysical status of omissions, show how omission involving causation exhibits striking dissimilarities from ordinary causation, and look closely at structures involving causation by omission, prevention, and combinations of prevention and preemption. We then look carefully at the problems these structures create for reductive accounts of causation, including causal modeling accounts, and pay particular attention to some recent and sophisticated attempts to connect the treatment of omission-involving causation with a distinction between default states and deviant states. We conclude that we find ourselves in the position of being unable to dismiss causation involving omissions, unable to assimilate it to garden-variety causation, and unable to give a decently unified or complete account of it using any of the standard approaches to causation that we have canvassed.

This chapter introduces some of the problems for analyses of causation, sketches some of the most significant approaches to providing a philosophical account of causation, and discusses the methodological rules we intend to follow. We discuss counterfactual analyses, regularity-based accounts, causal modeling or structural equations accounts, contrastive accounts, de facto accounts, and transference accounts in more detail, with the aim of developing a cleaner understanding of what an account of causation ought to accomplish, and a better appreciation of the point of the close, examples-based kind of analysis featured in the next three chapters. We include a developed discussion of our methodological rules, we sketch some of the metaphysical assumptions we will make, and we discuss and set aside a number of issues that space precludes us from taking up in further detail.

Causation is at once familiar and mysterious. Neither common sense nor extensive philosophical debate has led us to anything like agreement on the correct analysis of the concept of causation, or an account of the metaphysical nature of the causal relation. Causation: A User's Guide cuts a clear path through this confusing but vital landscape. L. A. Paul and Ned Hall guide the reader through the most important philosophical treatments of causation, negotiating the terrain by taking a set of examples as landmarks. They clarify the central themes of the debate about causation, and cover questions about causation involving omissions or absences, preemption and other species of redundant causation, and the possibility that causation is not transitive. Along the way, Paul and Hall examine several contemporary proposals for analyzing the nature of causation and assess their merits and overall methodological cogency.The book is designed to be of value both to trained specialists and those coming to the problem of causation for the first time. It provides the reader with a broad and sophisticated view of the metaphysics of the causal relation.

There are, by now, many rival, sophisticated philosophical accounts of causation that qualify as ‘metaphysically reductive’. This is a good thing: these collective efforts have vastly improved our understanding of causation over the last 30 years or so. They also put us in an excellent position to reflect on some central methodological questions: What exactly is the point of offering a metaphysical reduction of causation? What philosophical scruples ought to guide the pursuit of such a reduction? Finally, how should answers to these latter questions affect one’s assessment of the main contemporary approaches? That’s what we investigate in this essay. Section 1 lays out our presuppositions. Section 2 reviews a sample of philosophical accounts. Then comes the main event: Section 3 looks in detail at the foregoing methodological questions, closing with a reconsideration of our sample accounts, in light of what we’ve found.

Among the many philosophers who hold that causal facts1 are to be explained in terms of—or more ambitiously, shown to reduce to—facts about what happens, together with facts about the fundamental laws that govern what happens, the clear favorite is an approach that sees counterfactual dependence as the key to such explanation or reduction. The paradigm examples of causation, so advocates of this approach tell us, are examples in which events c and e— the cause and its effect— both occur, but: had c not occurred, e would not have occurred either. From this starting point ideas proliferate in a vast profusion. But the remarkable disparity among these ideas should not obscure their common foundation. Neither should the diversity of opinion about the prospects for a philosophical analysis of causation obscure their importance. For even those philosophers who see these prospects as dim—perhaps because they suffer post-Quinean queasiness at the thought of any analysis of any concept of interest—can often be heard to say such things as that causal relations among events are somehow “a matter of” the patterns of counterfactual dependence to be found in them.

Jonardon Ganeri, Paul Noordhof, and Murali Ramachandran (1996) have proposed a new counterfactual analysis of causation. We argue that this – the PCA-analysis – is incorrect. In section 1, we explain David Lewis’s first counterfactual analysis of causation, and a problem that led him to propose a second. In section 2 we explain the PCA-analysis, advertised as an improvement on Lewis’s later account. We then give counterexamples to the necessity (section 3) and sufficiency (section 4) of the PCA-analysis.

In the metaphysics of laws of nature, one fundamental philosophical question is whether we should give a metaphysical or rather an epistemic account of what they are; that is the core issue that divides ‘Humeans’ from ‘anti-Humeans’. In much the same way, a key question we face with essences is whether to give a metaphysical or rather an epistemic account of what they are. (So note well: in choosing to deploy the term ‘essence’ this chapter is not taking sides on the ‘Go metaphysical, or go epistemic?’ question. Just as we can be anti-metaphysical and still freely use the expression ‘law of nature’, so too we can be anti-metaphysical and freely use ‘essence’.) And the advantage of connecting these two topics is that we have made enough progress on the former for the lessons learned to provide valuable guidance for investigating the latter. Despite the author’s agnosticism about which approach is correct, the chapter mostly investigates the prospects for the ‘go epistemic’ option—what it calls ‘Humean reductionism about essence’.

There are two central questions concerning probability. First, what are its formal features? That is a mathematical question, to which there is a standard, widely (though not universally) agreed upon answer. This answer is reviewed in the next section. Second, what sorts of things are probabilities---what, that is, is the subject matter of probability theory? This is a philosophical question, and while the mathematical theory of probability certainly bears on it, the answer must come from elsewhere. To see why, observe that there are many things in the world that have the mathematical structure of probabilities---the set of measurable regions on the surface of a table, for example---but that one would never mistake for being probabilities. So probability is distinguished by more than just its formal characteristics. The bulk of this essay will be taken up with the central question of what this “more” might be

Recent enthusiasm for grounding often begins by observing that inquiry in metaphysics (and other areas) features a distinctive species of noncausal explanation. Having labeled this species “grounding explanation,” it’s a short step to the conclusion that we need a philosophical theory of grounding itself: an allegedly fundamental relation of metaphysical dependency between facts, such that a “grounding explanation” of some fact succeeds by providing information about what “grounds” that fact. This short step is hasty. For another live option is to accept that grounding explanation is a legitimate form of explanation, but to give it a thoroughly epistemic treatment, one that does not see it as involving any sort of special metaphysical relationship or structure at all. This paper sketches such a treatment, drawing inspiration from reflections on explanatory structure in mathematics.

This chapter investigates the prospects for an important position that falls under the "mere patterns" approach: what, for reasons that will emerge, the author calls"Humean reductionism" about laws of nature, a view championed perhaps most prominently by David Lewis. He reviews some of the most interesting arguments against this position from the literature, and adds some of his own that, he thinks, are more effective. The chapter considers how the best system account (BSA) would apply to the Newtonian particle world. The BSA has been challenged in a wide variety of ways: it violates certain intuitions; It makes a hash out of the connection between laws on the one hand, and counterfactuals, explanation, and induction on the other. The author thinks that the problem he has raised‐challenging though he hopes it is, is really an occasion for the Humean reductionist to sharpen his position still further.

The ‘Principal Principle’ states, roughly, that one's subjective probability for a proposition should conform to one's beliefs about that proposition's objective chance of coming true. David Lewis has argued (i) that this principle provides the defining role for chance; (ii) that it conflicts with his reductionist thesis of Humean supervenience, and so must be replaced by an amended version that avoids the conflict; hence (iii) that nothing perfectly deserves the name ‘chance’, although something can come close enough by playing the role picked out by the amended principle. We show that in fact there must be ‘chances’ that perfectly play what Lewis takes to be the defining role. But this is not the happy conclusion it might seem, since these ‘chances’ behave too strangely to deserve the name. The lesson is simple: much more than the Principal Principle—more to the point, much more than the connection between chance and credence—informs our understanding of objective chance. 1 Introduction 2 Preliminaries 3 Undermining futures and the New Principle 4 The Old Principle rescued? 5 The New Bug 6 Conclusion.

Causation is a deeply intuitive and familiar relation, gripped powerfully by common sense. Or so it seems. As is typical in philosophy, however, that deep intuitive familiarity has not led to any philosophical account of causation that is at once clean, precise, and widely agreed upon. Not for lack of trying: the last thirty years or so have seen dozens of attempts to provide such an account, and the pace of development is, if anything, accelerating. (See Collins et al. [2003a] for a comprehensive sampling of the latest work.)

What is the compositional structure of reality? That question divides naturally into these two: What is the compositional structure of the particulars that populate reality? And what is the structure of the properties and relations that fix what these entities are like? David Lewis‘s work in ontology and mereology provides the materials for an extraordinarily clean answer to the first question. First, among the particulars1 that populate reality are mereological simples: entities that have no proper parts. Second, every collection of such entities has a unique mereological fusion. And third, every particular is either a simple, or a fusion of simples.2 That‘s it. I propose to take this answer on board.3 What, then, about our second question? Here it looks as though we can draw on an additional Lewisian thesis: Joints: There is a distinction — at the level of metaphysics — between more and less natural properties. Some properties are perfectly natural; others are less-but-still-quite natural; still others are not very natural at all. This distinction earns its philosophical keep because of the number and centrality of the philosophical projects that must presuppose it. And to say that this distinction resides at the level of metaphysics is, at least in part, to say that it is not grounded in facts about human psychology.