•  120
    Old Problems for the Agency Theory of Causal Discourse
    Erkenntnis 84 (4): 939-951. 2019.
    Price’s :157–176, 1991; 44:187–203, 1993 ; 2007, 2017) agency theory of causation has takes itself to provide a use-theory of our causal discourse. The theory’s aim is to describe the rules implicit to our linguistic behaviour when we describe things in causal terms. According to this theory, the rules governing our use of the concept of causation are based on our perspective as agents and our associated experiences of manipulating events. I argue that the observed relation between agency and ou…Read more
  •  6
    Resolving Vagueness in the Ordering of Worlds
    Proceedings of the XXIII World Congress of Philosophy 62 147-152. 2018.
    Recently, David Lewis’ counterfactual theory of causation has been attacked by context-relativists, who point to a number of intuitively absurd consequences of Lewis’ view – e.g. that my birth is a cause of my death – in order to argue that whether or not an event c is a cause of some distinct event e varies relative to certain contextual factors. Not all ; Schaffer ; Maslen ; Northcott ) agree on how contexts should be fixed; but all argue that context-relative analyses better account for our i…Read more