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  1. Turning Negative Causation Back to Positive.Peter Fazekas & George Kampis - manuscript
    In contemporary literature, the fact that there is negative causation is the primary motivation for rejecting the physical connection view, and arguing for alternative accounts of causation. In this paper we insist that such a conclusion is too fast. We present two frameworks, which help the proponent of the physical connection view to resist the anti-connectionist conclusion. According to the first framework, there are positive causal claims, which co-refer with at least some negative causal claims. According to the second framework, (...)
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  2. Review of Mumford and Anjum, Getting Causes from Powers. [REVIEW]Troy Cross - forthcoming - Dialectica.
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  3. Causation and the conservation of energy in general relativity.Sebastián Murgueitio Ramírez, James Read & Andres Paez - forthcoming - The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science.
    Consensus in the contemporary philosophical literature has it that conserved quantity theories of causation such as that of Dowe [2000]—according to which causation is to be analysed in terms of the exchange of conserved quantities (e.g., energy)—face damning problems when confronted with contemporary physics, where the notion of conservation becomes delicate. In particular, in general relativity it is often claimed that there simply are no conservation laws for (say) total-stress energy. If this claim is correct, it is difficult to see (...)
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  4. Em Defesa do Necessitarismo Causal.Caio Cézar Silva dos Santos - 2023 - Dissertation, Universidade Federal Do Rio de Janeiro
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  5. Omissive Overdetermination: Why the Act-Omission Distinction Makes a Difference for Causal Analysis.Yuval Abrams - 2022 - University of Western Australia Law Review 1 (49):57-86.
    Analyses of factual causation face perennial problems, including preemption, overdetermination, and omissions. Arguably, the thorniest, are cases of omissive overdetermination, involving two independent omissions, each sufficient for the harm, and neither, independently, making a difference. A famous example is Saunders, where pedestrian was hit by a driver of a rental car who never pressed on the (unbeknownst to the driver) defective (and, negligently, never inspected) brakes. Causal intuitions in such cases are messy, reflected in disagreement about which omission mattered. What (...)
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  6. Is 'Cause' Ambiguous?Phil Corkum - 2022 - Philosophical Studies 179:2945-71.
    Causal pluralists hold that that there is not just one determinate kind of causation. Some causal pluralists hold that ‘cause’ is ambiguous among these different kinds. For example, Hall (2004) argues that ‘cause’ is ambiguous between two causal relations, which he labels dependence and production. The view that ‘cause’ is ambiguous, however, wrongly predicts zeugmatic conjunction reduction, and wrongly predicts the behaviour of ellipsis in causal discourse. So ‘cause’ is not ambiguous. If we are to disentangle causal pluralism from the (...)
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  7. How to Trace a Causal Process.J. Dmitri Gallow - 2022 - Philosophical Perspectives 36 (1):95-117.
    According to the theory developed here, we may trace out the processes emanating from a cause in such a way that any consequence lying along one of these processes counts as an effect of the cause. This theory gives intuitive verdicts in a diverse range of problem cases from the literature. Its claims about causation will never be retracted when we include additional variables in our model. And it validates some plausible principles about causation, including Sartorio's ‘Causes as Difference Makers’ (...)
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  8. Physics’ Contribution to Causation.Max Kistler - 2021 - Kriterion - Journal of Philosophy 35 (1):21-46.
    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 (...)
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  9. Cause and burn.David Rose, Eric Sievers & Shaun Nichols - 2021 - Cognition 207 (104517):104517.
    Many philosophers maintain that causation is to be explicated in terms of a kind of dependence between cause and effect. These “dependence” theories are opposed by “production” accounts which hold that there is some more fundamental causal “oomph”. A wide range of experimental research on everyday causal judgments seems to indicate that ordinary people operate primarily with a dependence-based notion of causation. For example, people tend to say that absences and double preventers are causes. We argue that the impression that (...)
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  10. Causes with material continuity.Lauren N. Ross - 2021 - Biology and Philosophy 36 (6):1-17.
    Recent philosophical work on causation has focused on distinctions across types of causal relationships. This paper argues for another distinction that has yet to receive attention in this work. This distinction has to do with whether causal relationships have “material continuity,” which refers to the reliable movement of material from cause to effect. This paper provides an analysis of material continuity and argues that causal relationships with this feature are associated with a unique explanatory perspective, are studied with distinct causal (...)
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  11. Processes, pre-emption and further problems.Andreas Hüttemann - 2020 - Synthese 197 (4):1487-1509.
    In this paper I will argue that what makes our ordinary judgements about token causation true can be explicated in terms of interferences into quasi-inertial processes. These interferences and quasi-inertial processes can in turn be fully explicated in scientific terms. In this sense the account presented here is reductive. I will furthermore argue that this version of a process-theory of causation can deal with the traditional problems that process theories have to face, such as the problem of misconnection and the (...)
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  12. Patterns, Information, and Causation.Holly Andersen - 2017 - Journal of Philosophy 114 (11):592-622.
    This paper articulates an account of causation as a collection of information-theoretic relationships between patterns instantiated in the causal nexus. I draw on Dennett’s account of real patterns to characterize potential causal relata as patterns with specific identification criteria and noise tolerance levels, and actual causal relata as those patterns instantiated at some spatiotemporal location in the rich causal nexus as originally developed by Salmon. I develop a representation framework using phase space to precisely characterize causal relata, including their degree (...)
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  13. Causes As Difference‐Makers For Processes.Christian Loew - 2017 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 98 (1):89-106.
    It is natural to think of causes as difference-makers. What exact difference causes make, however, is an open question. In this paper, I argue that the right way of understanding difference-making is in terms of causal processes: causes make a difference to a causal process that leads to the effect. I will show that this way of understanding difference-making nicely captures the distinction between causing an outcome and helping determine how the outcome happens and, thus, explains why causation is not (...)
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  14. A Plea for Pseudo‐Processes†.Elliott Sober - 2017 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 66 (3-4):303-309.
    Is all explanations causal explanation? Puzzles about barometer readings "explain" storms and shadow lengths "explaining" flagpole heights make it attractive to think so. Wesley Salmon (1984) has endorsed this causal thesis. One way to test this thesis is to assess the explanatory import of pseudo-processes. I do so by discussing the concept of heritability, which measures a pseudo-process, and one role it played in the theory of natural selection: explaining response to selection. This will show, not just that heritability has (...)
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  15. Wozu eine Störungstheorie der Kausalität?Andreas Hüttemann - 2015 - Zeitschrift für Philosophische Forschung 69 (2):181-196.
    The paper presents a version of a theory of actual causation in terms of default-processes and interferences. I will defend this account against criticisms raised by Sebastian Schmoranzer. I will in particular try to explain in what sense the proposed account of causation is reductive. Furthermore I will elucidate how it deals with controversially discussed issues such as pre-emption and the transitivity of causation.
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  16. Causal foundationalism, physical causation, and difference-making.Luke Glynn - 2013 - Synthese 190 (6):1017-1037.
    An influential tradition in the philosophy of causation has it that all token causal facts are, or are reducible to, facts about difference-making. Challenges to this tradition have typically focused on pre-emption cases, in which a cause apparently fails to make a difference to its effect. However, a novel challenge to the difference-making approach has recently been issued by Alyssa Ney. Ney defends causal foundationalism, which she characterizes as the thesis that facts about difference-making depend upon facts about physical causation. (...)
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  17. A disposition-based process theory of causation.Andreas Hüttemann - 2013 - In Stephen Mumford & Matthew Tugby (eds.), Metaphysics and Science. Oxford University Press. pp. 101.
    Given certain well-known observations by Mach and Russell, the question arises what place there is for causation in the physical world. My aim in this chapter is to understand under what conditions we can use causal terminology and how it fi ts in with what physics has to say. I will argue for a disposition-based process-theory of causation. After addressing Mach’s and Russell’s concerns I will start by outlining the kind of problem the disposition based process-theory of causation is meant (...)
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  18. A weakened mechanism is still a mechanism: On the causal role of absences in mechanistic explanation.Alexander Mebius - 2013 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 45 (1):43-48.
    Much contemporary debate on the nature of mechanisms centers on the issue of modulating negative causes. One type of negative causability, which I refer to as “causation by absence,” appears difficult to incorporate into modern accounts of mechanistic explanation. This paper argues that a recent attempt to resolve this problem, proposed by Benjamin Barros, requires improvement as it overlooks the fact that not all absences qualify as sources of mechanism failure. I suggest that there are a number of additional types (...)
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  19. Transference, or identity theories of causation?María José García-Encinas - 2010 - Theoria 19 (1):31-47.
    I argue that transference is, ultimately, identity over time, and that identity over time can't possibly be causation. Transference, then, fails as an analysis of causation.
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  20. Where’s the biff?Toby Handfield, Charles R. Twardy, Kevin B. Korb & Graham Oppy - 2008 - Erkenntnis 68 (2):149-68.
    This paper presents an attempt to integrate theories of causal processes—of the kind developed by Wesley Salmon and Phil Dowe—into a theory of causal models using Bayesian networks. We suggest that arcs in causal models must correspond to possible causal processes. Moreover, we suggest that when processes are rendered physically impossible by what occurs on distinct paths, the original model must be restricted by removing the relevant arc. These two techniques suffice to explain cases of late preëmption and other cases (...)
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  21. Is There a Problem of Action at a Temporal Distance?Rögnvaldur Ingthorsson - 2007 - SATS 8 (1):138-154.
    It has been claimed that the only way to avoid action at a temporal distance in a temporal continuum is if effects occur simultaneously with their causes, and that in fact Newton’s second law of motion illustrates that they truly are simultaneous. Firstly, I point out that this interpretation of Newton’s second law is problematic because in classical mechanics ‘acceleration’ denotes a vector quantity. It is controversial whether vectors themselves are changes as opposed to properties of a change, and therefore (...)
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  22. Wesley Salmon, a memoir.Merrilee Salmon - 2005 - Enrahonar: Quaderns de Filosofía 37:11-16.
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  23. Transference, or identiry theories of causation?María José García-Encinas - 2004 - Theoria 19 (1):31-47.
    Transference theorists propose to explain causation in terms of the transference of a physical element. I argue, in two steps, that this is not possible. First, I show that available accounts of ‘transference’ ultimately convey that transference -and, consequently, causation- is the (non-relational) identity over time of the transferred element (a universal, a trope, or even an absolute substance). But, second, I try to defend, it is conceptually impossible that causation is (non-relational) identity.
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  24. Transference, or identity theories of causation?María José García-Encinas - 2004 - Theoria 19 (1):31-47.
    Transference theorists propose to explain causation in terms of the transference of a physical element. I argue, in two steps, that this is not possible. First, I show that available accounts of ‘transference’ ultimately convey that transference -and, consequently, causation- is the (non-relational) identity over time of the transferred element (a universal, a trope, or even an absolute substance). But, second, I try to defend, it is conceptually impossible that causation is (non-relational) identity.
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  25. The Localism of the Conserved Quality Theory.Agustín Vicente Benito - 2002 - Theoria: Revista de Teoría, Historia y Fundamentos de la Ciencia 17 (3):563-571.
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  26. Review of Dowe, Physical Causation. [REVIEW]D. M. Hausman - 2002 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part B: Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics 33 (4):717-24.
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  27. Causal Production as Interaction.Rognvaldur Ingthorsson - 2002 - Metaphysica 3 (1):87-119.
    The paper contains a novel realist account of causal production and the necessary connection between cause and effect. I argue that the asymmetric relation between causally connected events must be regarded as a product of a symmetric interaction between two or more entities. All the entities involved contribute to the producing, and so count as parts of the cause, and they all suffer a change, and so count as parts of the effect. Cause and effect, on this account, are two (...)
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  28. Program explanation: A general perspective.Frank Jackson & Philip Pettit - 1990 - Analysis 50 (2):107-17.
    Some properties are causally relevant for a certain effect, others are not. In this paper we describe a problem for our understanding of this notion and then offer a solution in terms of the notion of a program explanation.
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  29. Non-probabilistic Causation without Necessitation.Daniel Von Wachter - manuscript
    This article introduces the notion of the directedness of a process, which underlies event causation as well as the persistence of things. Using this notion it investigates what happens in typical cases of active event causation. Causes never necessitate their effects because even non- probabilistic causes can be counteracted.
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